MPMan

The MPMan music player, manufactured by the South Korean company SaeHan Information Systems, debuted in Asia in March 1998, and was the first mass-produced portable solid state digital audio players.

The internal flash memory could be expanded, but there was no support for external memory. It was delivered with a docking station. To put music into the device, the music first had to be encoded in the mp3 format by an encoder provided by the user, and then transferred via the parallel port to the docking station that connected to the portable player device.

On 2 May 1998 in Japan the Akihabara "Akiba ~ us" stores in Chūō, Tokyo started selling 32 MB and 64 MB models, the prices of which were 39 800 yen (circa 400 USD - today $580.73) and 59 800 yen, respectively.

In North America, the South Korean device was first imported for sale by Michael Robertson's Z Company in mid-1998. Around the same time, Eiger Labs, Inc. imported and rebranded the player in two models, the Eiger MPMan F10, and Eiger MPMan F20.