Samsung catching up with the Apple

The Samsung K3.

The local tech blogosphere:
Rod Drury's take on the budget: "Good, I think."
Aardvark's take: "A fairly good compromise."
Mauricio at Geekzone links to a whitepaper explaining the security improvements in Windows Vista. Worth checking out if you want to know more about features like Windows Firewall and Windows Defender, before you upgrade.

When it comes to music player sales, iPod comes in number one in most markets around the world, including ours. In fact, sales of the iPod drove a couple of years of strong growth at local, sharemarket-listed Apple distributor

Renaissance

.

But what of the other players in our market? We hear relatively little of the Creative Zen or iRiver here. Apple's rivals do relatively little marketing, but we do have some strong Windows-centric online music stores in the likes of

Digirama

and

Amplifier

, so there's a market for decent alternatives.

Well, the latest figures from market research company Gfk reveal a strengthening second player - Korean electronics maker Samsung, which seems to be having a revival with its "K" range of music players equivalent to that Motorola experienced with its RAZR line of phones. Samsung now has second place in the local market in music player sales behind Apple, having sold 300,000 players here the year to March 31.

In that period it doubled its market share to nine per cent and its share of the value of the market to 10 per cent. It looks like Samsung has started to become a compelling buy as a music player, at least locally.

I wasn't so keen on the

Samsung K5

($399 for 4GB version) which was a little chunky for my liking and the built-in external speaker wasn't a feature I'd have thought particularly useful on a device which is likely to be plugged into either your headphones or your stereo via an audio cable most of the time.

But the K3 is something else (

CNet

gives it 7.7 out of 10). It looks a lot better than the K5, and is the closest thing in looks to the iPod Nano to have hit the market yet. It's no Nano killer, but it's probably the best slim-line music player to emerge outside the Apple camp. I've been trialling the 2GB K3 for the last couple of weeks and its a nice little device - the OLED display and slick black and chrome finish is very stylish. The sound quality and functionality is good, an FM tuner is the most obvious thing it has that my 8GB iPod Nano doesn't. I wouldn't go for the 2GB K5 though, the 4GB one ($299) is reasonably priced and gives reasonable storage.

While we're on music, an

interesting article

at ZDNet about the potential for a DRM-free world of music downloads with Amazon's new music store joining Apple in selling DRM-free EMI tracks.

Also, Russell Brown at

Public Address

has news that Coke's online music store is set to close in August. I'm seeking verification of this from Coke and the reason for the closure. Coketunes would seem to be a thorn in the side of the other local download sites, which may run contrary to Coke's push for the youth market. But it's model supposedly allowed for profits to be put back into the music industry, so for that reason it seemed like a worthwhile venture.

What music player and music download services are you using? Anyone got any views on Samsung mp3 players and in particular the K3?