Our Product of the Week for this past week is Aiwa's new Bluetooth-friendly MP3 player.

Product Name
XDM-S710BT

Product Image(s) 
[1]

Product Code
XDM-S710BT

Vendor
Aiwa

Release Date
December 1st, 2004

Price
28,000 yen

Overview
This past week, Aiwa announced a flash-memory based MP3 player with a 256MB capacity called the "XDM-S710BT." The "BT" in its product code is for "Bluetooth," and the player takes advantage of the technology quite extensively. The primary reason Aiwa added Bluetooth to the player is so that it could serve as a wireless headset for your mobile phone -- this includes using the player itself as a microphone, using your headphones to hear the other party (even while listening to music, your phone will "ring" inside of your headphones), and a display of the incoming caller's information on your player's LCD display.
But there's more to this player than just Bluetooth. It is, after all, an audio player. Aiwa has equipped the S710BT with the ability to play ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, and MP3 files. Most consumers probably won't ever touch the former two files, but they can rest assured that this player will indeed play all of their downloaded MP3 music without conversion to a different format.
One potential disadvantage of the S710BT is o­n the software end; Aiwa requires that you install a special driver to upload music. It's fairly uncommon for modern flash-based players to not support the USB Mass Storage class, meaning you don't have to install any drivers to upload/download files. Quite a drawback.
If installing drivers doesn't bother you, however, and own a Bluetooth phone, you may want to look into the S710BT. Or maybe not? Aiwa has been o­ne of the first companies to announce an MP3 player with Bluetooth support -- I'm sure many more will follow suit.

Reasoning
Plain and simple: this is o­ne of the first MP3 players to support Bluetooth. Personally, I had hoped for it to also take advantage of Bluetooth to be completely wireless, so that you wouldn't need a cord for your headphones, but I guess I'll be waiting some more. Also, Aiwa (and thereby Sony) has o­nce again dug their own graves by requiring installation of special software. Whether or not installing the software is a hassle is of no consequence; the fact that you need to install software _at all_ will likely turn off a large audience this player could have had.
Still, there has to be a pioneering product for all fields. I'm glad to see an MP3 player supporting Bluetooth -- o­ne of the reasons I hadn't even considered purchasing a Bluetooth phone is that I had no use for the feature. Now I do.

Official Product Site
http://www.jp.aiwa.com/ [2] [3]

Related TechJapan Coverage
Aiwa Bluetooth MP3 player, 100 hour battery life, etc. [4] (November 11th, 2004)