Good bye Rio (the MP3 player pioneer)

See "Death bells ring for Rio as they are cut up and sold to SigmaTel"

It's sad 'coz I still believe among all competitors of Apple iPod, Rio Karma has the best features, design and UI, in fact, even better than iPod. This is based on my experience of owning one for 2 weeks (returned for battery life issue)

So, once again it proves that it takes more a good feature set to win in the consumer electronics business. You'd need marketing, marketing, marketing (yes, it's so important that I have to repeat it again and again), quality control and customer service as well. This is reinforced by my recent good (surprise!) experience with getting my iPod fixed (the headphone jack has bad connectivity) at an Apple store (BTW, there was no service dept at Apple store. Apple named it "Genius Bar." The name is a bit too arrogant and exaggerated but that's Steve's call, not mine. The service rep was actually a very helpful gentleman. He looked at my iPod and found that the remote control was the culprit. He simply swapped it with a new one.)

If fixing my Rio was this easy, I would have kept it and won't even consider iPod! Apple opening all these retail stores over the country turned out wasn't such a bad move.