Toshiba announced Monday a new hard drive-based digital audio player with a 60 GByte storage capacity. It will first be available in Japan in November and in the first quarter of 2005 in Europe and the USA, the company said.

The first players to go on sale will be its F series models (see photo below), using the company’s 1.8" hard disk drive. There are three models in the range with hard-disk sizes of 10GB, 20GB and 60GB. The drives for all three players are produced in-house by Toshiba and the company says the new Gigabeat is the first digital music player to use the 60GB drive.

Read the complete story .