Iomega Re-Brands, Re-Targets Clik!

Iomega Corp., once on the leading edge of removable storage technology, has renamed and re-branded its Clik! technology, and now has its sights firmly set on the exploding digital music market.

Iomega recently announced that on September 24, it would ship the HipZip digital audio player, a device that plays digital music and supports licensed digital downloads of copyrighted music and spoken word content. The player uses PocketZip (formerly Clik!) 40MB disks and supports Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format (WMA), MP3, and Windows Media Rights Manager technology. The company says other music formats will be supported in the future. (For PC users, HipZip includes Windows Media Player 7; Mac users get MusicMatch.)

Clik! drives and media were originally targeted at the removable storage market and were a follow up to Iomega's hugely successful Zip drives. Initial Clik! drives shipped nearly a year after they were first announced (remember those annoying Clik!-ers at Comdex?) and never made waves in the market. There's little consensus on the reasons for the technology's mediocre success rate. But well-publicized and somewhat ironic "clicking" sounds in many Zip drives; the proliferation of huge, cheap hard drives; the introduction of CD-RW; and the use of the Internet instead of removable media to swap files all played a part in Clik!'s re-branding.

In addition to its software bundle, the HipZip ($299 retail) includes two disks, headphones, a rechargeable lithium ion battery, and a USB interface. Iomega points out that PocketZip disks ($l0-$15 each, depending on the number purchased) are significantly cheaper than flash and are serialized, to allow for the downloading of copyrighted material. But they are also not solid state, as RAM is, and hence the disk can skip (though HipZip includes a buffer to prevent this).

Iomega's new device, while hip, isn't without drawbacks. It is comparatively expensive, with similar devices in the crowded MP3 player field costing up to $150 less. The company also claims that each 40MB PocketZip disk will hold "about 80 minutes of digital music." This estimate seems wildly optimistic, especially since even 64MB of flash holds only about one CD's worth of music (about 75 minutes). Newer devices (as illustrated by Creative's $499 Nomad Jukebox) hold gigabytes of data--which translates to a hundred hours of music--and may offer a better ratio of performance versus price. As such hard disk-based units proliferate, they will drop in price, squeezing devices at the high end of the portable market--devices like the HipZip.