According to the Japanese press group IMPRESS, Olympus want to cease the production and sale of their m:robe 500 and 100 MP3 players temporarily. It seems that the sales of the innovating 500 is below expectation, which could be explained by the hefty competition from Apple’s iPOD. To venture onto this market was obviously not without a risk…

The official statement from Olympus states that the company wants to focus on digital cameras, so if we feed that in our Marketing Speak traslator machine, we get something like: We tried, we failed, we’re stopping for now and we’re not sure that we’ll be back in the MP3 player business.