How Far has the MP3 Come?

Never before have so many high tech products been so accessible through electronic wholesalers nor have they been so cheap. Particularly prevalent on the web, wholesale electronics have reached a comfortable place in today's marketplace. And the rush of evolution in the field is overwhelming.

Let's look at the progress of the MP3 player as an example. In 1987, the chase was on for a way to compress music files to make them tiny but retain full sound. The German Fraunhofer Institute is credited with this early research, led by Karlheinz Brandenburg. The effort nearly failed due to some mistakes along the way, but by 1996 the first American patent was issued. In 1998, Eiger Labs released the "MPMAN F10." Listen to this, because the comparison with currently available wholesale electronic products is amazing: the MPMAN was priced at $250, provided eight 4-minute tunes and had 32 MB of storage!

Next the music business saw fit to have a say. The Diamond Rio PMP300 came out and the music industry went nuts, bringing a lawsuit and claiming musical robbery. The ruling sent the plaintiff packing and held that a "revolutionary new method of music distribution" had come. The electronic wholesalers' universe had changed.

The next dramatic leap in the device was providing a microphone and 64MB of built-in memory. Then an expansion slot was invented. Manufacturers then included an FM receiver; offered fun colors, and in 1999, produced portables that held 1,200 songs! But even these fast developments were became as nothing compared to what happened next.

The Apple iPod. Produced in 2001, the Apple iPod was expensive ($400) and not able to interface with Windows, but it featured over 1,000 songs and novel ways to access them. It became the model to imitate.

The story since then is stupendous. Apple's iPod has revolutionized the music business and the world of wholesale electronics. The iPod now comes in numerous models: the iPod nano 4G, iPod touch 2G, iPod classic 2G, iPod shuffle 3G and iPod shuffle 2G. They've got video, wi-fi, external speakers, and battery power for up to 36 hours. Remember the MPMAN with its 8 songs? These new models hold between 1750 and 30,000 songs and cost between 79 and 400 dollars!

And the iPod is just the beginning: electronic wholesalers now stock literally hundreds of brands with all sorts of features. Interestingly, by now, more music players are sold in cell phones than as stand-alones. Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, SonyEricsson and LG released music phones as early as 2005 and guesstimates are that more than half of all cell phones in the world have an MP3 player. How many MP3 players have been sold altogether is unmeasurable. You can even find wholesale electronics sellers offering players for as little as $30.

The pace of this technology and its over-all high quality are truly astonishing. Who knows what will happen next? Some hope to see scores of functions being built into one instrument -- camera, video-recorder, computer, phone, maybe somebody will figure out how to attach a tiny stove some day! Anyway, hang onto your hats, wholesale electronics are going to be a wild ride