Treo 10 Offers Pocket Music Library

You used to need 180 full, 12-inch LPs to keep 150 hours of music. Then 120 5-inch CDs could do the trick. Now E-Digital's Treo 10, just released, lets you carry that much--and a good deal more--in a shirt pocket.

Don't confuse the Treo 10 with Handspring's Treo line of combo phone-PDA palmtops; E-Digital's $249 product is an entirely different portable device. And portable is the operative word. The Treo 10 measures 4.63 by 3.03 by .77 inches, and weighs just 9.9 ounces including the carrying case and battery. It can hold about 150 hours of music, according to E-Digital.

The secret to that huge capacity is a 2.5-inch, 10GB hard drive. What sort of effect does a spinning disk have on the battery life of a pocket device? According to E-Digital, not as much as you'd think. The drive is usually still, thanks to a cache that holds about eight minutes of music. E-Digital estimates the battery will run about six hours between charges, but eight or nine-hour runs are conceivable if you're playing a program non-stop, according to a spokesperson. Picking new songs and changing the line-up uses more juice.

Music in Place

Moving your music from CDs (and other media) to the Treo 10 is a two-step process, so E-Digital bundles two Windows programs. First, there's MusicMatch Jukebox for ripping titles to your PC's hard drive. Once they're stored on that disk, you use E.Digital's own MXP Music Explorer to organize and transfer tracks to the Treo 10. These programs currently support Windows 98 and 2000; E-Digital is hoping to offer Windows XP support in the first quarter.

The Treo 10 currently supports the MP3 and Windows Media audio formats. New formats are inevitable, so E-Digital has built the Treo 10 to be upgradeable over the Internet. The gadget is also expected to support future digital rights management systems should we be unlucky enough to need them.

Once everything is in the Treo 10, you choose what you want to hear via a menu system on the device's backlit LCD screen. You can organize tracks as you would files on a PC's hard drive, within folders and subfolders. For instance, you might choose to organize your music so you can pick Rock/Beatles/Sergeant Pepper/Within You Without You, or Mozart/E flat Major/Horn & Orchestra.

The Treo 10 package includes earphones, an AC adaptor/charger, a USB cable, a carrying case, and a rechargeable Lithiium Ion battery. The battery, alas, is not a standard size such as AA; you can only replace it through E-Digital. The device is currently available only through E-Digital's online store.