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"Virgin Electronics unveiled on Tuesday a digital audio player with a 5GB hard disk, in a bid to penetrate the market dominated by Apple Computer's iPod."



The $249 Virgin Player, weighing 3.1 ounces, supports MP3 and WMA music formats and is capable of working with various digital music services, the company said.





The device has separate buttons for volume, skipping to the next song, and pausing the music, and features the ability to create playlists. The storage is sufficient for 1,200 MP3 songs, or around 80 compact discs, it said.





Apple's $249 iPod Mini has a 4GB hard drive, can store 1,000 songs and weighs 3.6 ounces.



Virgin said support for open standards such as WMA will let people select the music service of their choice. The device comes bundled with the company's music software and service, Virgin Digital, which sells song downloads for 99 cents, or monthly subscriptions for $7.99



[Via C|Net]



The MethodShop Spin: In all honesty, Virgin may be to late to try and overcome the "king kong" of the mini players (iPod). Though more music is able to be stored on Virgin's player, lack of support for the ITMS may have a drastic effect on Virgin's success.