SigmaTel Inside

Forgive the audio player geekery, but SigmaTel has announced an upated version of its D-Major MP3 player chipset. SigmaTel also announced that D-Major provides the core of the new Rio Carbon and Forge players.

We make mention of new chipsets because of their importance to the audio player market. A handful of chipmakers such as SigmaTel and Player Portal power virtually every audio player on the market. Thus, the features they choose to add (or not add) have an amplified effect on the market.

On the surface the new D-Major chipset seems to be fairly feature-rich, except for USB Host capability. USB Host (sometimes known as USB On the Go) lets you connect a digital camera directly to the player to transfer photos off of the camera's smaller memory card. We're really suprised to see this missing because USB Host and color LCDs are just about the only two major features missing from the market-leading iPod.

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