German iPod Killer: TrekStor MP3 Player

While Apple is more successful than any other mp3 player manufacturer worldwide, it's not so in Germany. The top mp3 player company is TrekStor. It sells more mp3 players than Apple does. And now the company is bracing itself to expand into the UK. Not only does it believe it can be a success in the UK, it's aiming to become the Number Three manufacturer (behind Apple and Creative) before the end of the year.

Gil Szmigiel, TrekStor's chief technology officer, states, "In Germany we've been going since 2001. In most markets we're in, in Germany, we're in the top three brands, and in a lot of cases we're number one. For example in the MP3 player market, Apple is the biggest brand in every country in the world. But not so here in Germany. We sell more MP3 players than Apple does here."

"We have over 120 awards for our MP3 players already and that's because we're not trying to force the customer into acting in a specific way - like only buying music from iTunes where you can't put other music on your device. You can use DRM 9 and DRM 10 with our products as well as normal MP3 and WMA files.

"We're not trying to copy Apple in any way, design-wise or anything. If you look at our products you will not find anything that's similar to an Apple product, they're all very distinctive and different. It doesn't make sense to copy somebody because customers will always want to just go and buy the original."

[tech.co.uk]

Check out the comparison chart for four TrekStor players (click to view actual size):

[TrekStor]