M-DMP, PMP, DAP
A mobile digital media player (M-DMP), portable media player (PMP), or digital audio player (DAP) is a portable device capable of storing and playing back digital media.
In 1979 Kane Kramer made a design for one of the earliest digital audio players. His prototype was capable of approximately one our of audio playback but was never part of any commercial production.
In 1981 Apple Inc. hired Kramer as a consultant.
In 1997 Audible.com MobilePlayer, brought out the first production-volume portable digital audio player. It was called The Audio Player (also known as MobilePlayer or Digital Words To GO). It cost 200$, had 4mb of internal flash memory with about 2 hours of playback time.
Also in 97 SaeHan/Eiger MPMan launched the first MP3 player the “MPMan”, sold originally in Asia the company licensed the Eiger Labs in North America to distributed it. These early MP3 players offered 32mb of storage and had flash memory.
The next year in 1998 Compaq was working on a “Personal Jukebox”. This was the first portable music device developed with a 2.5” laptop hard drive. The initial capacity was 4.8GB and was advertised with a capacity of 1200 songs.
Moving into the millennium, in October of 2000 a South Korean software company, Cowon Systems, debuted their first MP3 player under the brand name iAUDIO. Later Cowon would be accused of stealing the “i” prefix from Apple even though the iAUDIO was branded and launched one year prior to the first iPod.
2001, Apple shows off the first iPod. It boasts a 5gb 1.8” toshiba hard drive and brilliant 2” monochrome display. Initially only compatible with Macintosh community Apple changed this in 2002 when they released the second generation iPod and Musicmatch Jukebox.
Microsoft entered the PMP market in 2004 when it launched the Portable Media Center and the Zen Portable Media Center, as part of the Zune series.
In 2005 SanDisk, maker of flash memory, released it’s own line of PMP. The Sansa series started with the e100, moved to the m200 line and the c100 line.
2007 Apple debuts the iPod Touch, just one year after its now famous iPhone. Between October and December of 07 Apple sold 22.1 million iPod touch units. As of 2007 Apple had over 70% of the market share in MP3 players. In more recent years Apple has moved onto pushing it’s iPhone and iPads, but it is still a big player in the mobile and music markets.
