I was rummaging through my basement over the weekend, looking for some plugs or cables or something, when I came upon a great box of old electronics and gadgets.  I never did find the cable I was looking for, but I did find my first digital music player: The Rio 800 digital audio player.  Back in its day, before Apple captured the field with the iPod, the Rio was pretty much the gold standard for music players. 

Of course, the Rio 800 came long before portable devices could display album art, videos, or photos.  So, a large, color screen, even if available, would have added little benefit.  The Rio 800 did introduce a novel concept at the time: the memory backpack.  The memory and battery were contained in a removable back section.  Users could carry several backpacks and swap them into the player in order to add different music.  These backpacks came in 32 MB, 64 MB, and the inconceivably large 128 MB varieties.  Fast forward eight years (the Rio 800 was released in December 2000) where four GB is considered impossibly inadequate, and many media players offer 16 or 32 GB of storage.   

I also remember, at the time, being amazed by how small this player was.  Of course, I had not seen any of today’s players.  Here it is with the latest Microsoft Zune, iPod Nano, Sony Walkman Video, and Sandisk Sansa Fuze.  All of which are dwarfed by the Rio.  And how does it stack up?  The Rio is almost as thick as all four players combined.

The distance these players have progressed since the beginning of this decade is absolutely staggering.  When I bought the Rio 800, no one could have imagined that these players would shrink so much, yet increase the memory capacity almost exponentially.  Likewise, who could have foreseen such advanced features as full color screen, video playback, album art, not to mention Wi-fi connectivity and Bluetooth. 

All of which begs the question, where will digital media players go from here?  The distance from the Rio to today’s players span less than a decade.  what will the next decade bring?  What advanced features should we expect to find in the media player of tomorrow?