Diamond Multimedia ships Rio 500

Diamond Multimedia ships Rio 500 puts another piece of PC gear into the September hardware pile, and 1999 is not exactly short on that right now.

the shipment of the Rio 500, a next-generation portable MP3 player. Diamond Multimedia’s Rio 500 player features 64MB of built-in memory and allows up to two hours of continuous digital music listening. The player’s USB connection provides download speeds five times faster than parallel port connections and is compatible with both PC and Macintosh computers.

The hardware race is getting mean, and the upside is simple: gamers keep getting faster, stranger toys to bolt into their rigs.