Rio today announced a new 5GB digital music player that was created to compete with Apple’s 4GB iPod mini. The Rio Carbon features up to 20 hours of battery life, a USB 2.0 interface, an LED backlight display, a touch sensitive directional pad for easier navigation, voice recording capabilities, and support for PC and Mac platforms. The Rio Carbon is expected to ship in August for US$249. In other Rio news, the company introduced a new flash-based player, the Rio Forge, which comes in 512MB ($199), 256MB ($169) and 128MB ($139) capacities. The device offers up to 20 hours of battery life, expandable memory with a SD/MMC memory card, and USB 2.0 interface. The Rio Forge also sports an FM tuner, stopwatch and FM recording on the 256MB and 512MB models.