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Flipster Portable Plays MPEG-4
An anonymous reader says "Pogo! Products has released a mediabox called the Flipster that plays MPEG-4 video and MP3 & WMA tunes. The unit's screen can display JPG and GIF graphics as well. What is interesting is the decision to go with flash memory for storage. Capacity is limited to 128MB plus whatever MMC card you put in the expansion slot. While it allows the Flipster comes in at 3.7oz, I would prefer to see something using the 10GB Toshiba drive found in the iPod. Maybe I'll wait for the Archos Jukebox Multimedia, but I'm beginning to wonder if that portable will ever appear."
The unit's screen can display JPG and GIF graphics as well...
More ways to carry pr0n round in my pocket! Yay for technology!
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
This is functionality that is only useful when incorporated into other devices, like cel phones or PDAs.
128 MB of movies!!
wohoo!!
I would like to only have to carry a single handheld device. And there is no way I'll stop carrying a phone around. Therefore I would like to see the kind of features this device has in a phone rather than in a device that does not obsolete my phone.
If it has enough power to play videos, surely it has enough to play ogg.
Would an IBM Microdrive work in one of these? Speaking of which, now that IBM is getting out of the hard drive business, will those things even continue to exist?
Strange, it would seem to me that a "straight" PVR version would have been more successful than any of those. (Both can play MP3 and MPEG-4 video. The first is small and the second is a "jukebox" version with 10GB HD.)
I'd love to put something like this next to my TV and use it to play stuff I find online. But it doesn't seem like it will be very good for that purpose. (The big one can be used as a PVR, but no networking built in.)
Just seems strange that they haven't targetted the most obvious market instead of to rather fringe ones.
I don't mean to start a holy war, but I have to admit that Windows Media Audio sounds better than MP3 at the same bitrates. Of course, it is Microsoft, the EULA on it sucks, and it's proprietary/closed/what have you, but I have noticed it sounds better.
For reference, my music is ripped to 256 kilobit MP3s, but when loading stuff onto portable players, 64 kilobit WMA actually sounds decent. Seriously; compare it.
If you look at their products page, all their devices seem to be lacking enough memory. 64 and 128 megs for mpeg-4 files? Even the mp3 players they have use storage sizes that were barely acceptable 2 years ago. My ipod is maxed out at 5GB, I couldnd't imagine dealing with 128meg limit for video files.
If you're out there coding up software or drawing up circuit diagrams or in some other way preparing to release a product on the world, please bear in mind that as of October 23, 2000, the use of the suffix "ster" was officially deprecated as being Fucking Stupid. Please consider changing the planned name of Spreadsheetster or Videoplayerster or Toasterster before it hits the market.
Thank you, that is all.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
I just bought a zaurus, and they talk like sony has already made a Mpeg4 video player update for it, but has yet to release it, it already plays Mpeg1 and 2 if im not mistaken, and of course it does MP3s, and downloadable programs can make it play OGG. heh and with a 802.11b card on the NC State campus, and a 40 gig NFS partition, ill have all the storage ill ever need on a PDA
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
I grammar at good to be!
As a part-time fellow troll, let me tell you that your repeated automated posting is getting tiresome. You CAN use automated tools to probe for new stories, but then let it ring a bell and YOU get 20 secs to troll manually. Heck, even Klerck's page widening posts had an ontopic subject like "IBM likes it wide" if the story was about IBM. Let's all do our part to make the score:-1 posts more entertaining.
Anyone else notice that the supported operating systems are "MS Windows 98/2000/Me"? Why would it work under Win2k and not XP? Seems quite strange, seeing as the two are quite similar, and especially because XP is Microsoft's officially-backed "next-generation" home OS.
voicestream / t-mobile is about to come out with this phone:l t.asp
http://www.voicestream.com/pocketpc/defau
o2 has these now:
http://www.o2.co.uk
That's about 3 times lighter than a beer.
Other than running Windows CE instead of PocketPC (IIRC WinCE 3.0 was the version just before PocketPC 2000) and not appearing to have a stylus, but just having buttons instead, it looks like it has the same or similar guts to most models of iPaq.
Lower screen resolution (160x234 as compared to 320x240 on an iPaq), typical Microsoft codecs for audio compression/decompression, and not much more memory than an iPaq with only another hundred bucks of price... I dunno. I just can't see spending $399/449 on one of these instead of going to $499 or $549 for a nicely loaded iPaq. If this thing had the ability to synchronize with Apple or Linux, it might have some advantages... but it doesn't.
Nice idea, but for what they're offering, the price should drop down to someplace around $199-$250.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
This is a pure example of a product with an ill-defined target audience. All in all, it comes down to that this can only be used ideally as a MP3 player. But with a $449 price tag, this is rather expensive for this purpose.
With 64 MB memory, it can maybe hold a couple minutes of video at most. Maybe with an expansion card, it can hold a little more. But in the end, why would you spend this much money on a device that can only hold a couple minutes of video? At this price, you might as well get an iPaq that will be able to do the same exact thing plus more.
What would be a killer-app would be if they expanded the hdd to (what many of you mentioned) a Toshiba 10 GB hdd. At this point, you will then be able to hold a couple full length movies. Build in an external port to TV-out and there will be some actual application.
But to summarize, the limiting factor of this device is that relatively small storage space and a high price tag. In the end, they are not targetting any specific audience successfully.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
An 8 by 5 cluster would give HDTV resolution. Sweet!
can you read this?
Ewww, is fucking discusting!
Yup, I agree. Products like that really piss me off. Kewl features and form factor but just enough storage to make it utterly fucking useless. Hell, 128 isn't even enough for music IMO. That is unless you like the swirling hiss of 64K overly compressed tunes. That and changing your playlist more often than our shorts ;-)
I was thinking about this.... Exactly how powerful are these handhelds? I know it takes a buttload of CPU/RAM for the Wince. However, I was thinking of a design that would be fairly powerful (resource wise), and not be a battery soaker.
Why not use a 500 MHz equalavalent Crusoe processor with linux. I'm not advocating doing things with command-line either (it'll be accessable if needed). You'd be able to put a heavy size HD in this. For the video, mplayer. That might run a bit of problems with Microsoft (linux mplayer can play/convert asf and WMV). Slap on a ethernet and 1 usb and a video out (maybe a serial port).
I'd expect this to go for a lot, but it's a full comp that can do nearly everything.
No, what's really interesting is the choice of MMC/SD instead of CompactFlash. If CompactFlash had been used, the device would have a 1 GB capacity today, with more in the future. CompactFlash cards contain the controller logic, so the future is virtually limitless.
By choosing MMC/SD, the controller logic is integral to the Flipster and becomes the limiting factor in how large an expansion card can be used. You can bet the limit will be low, perhaps only 128 MB, to push customers into buying a newer model Flipster in the future. Significant portions of the built-in 64 or 128 MB memory may also be scavanged to support secure data on SD cards, as is done on the HP/Compaq iPaq.
Since we know nothing in this world is really secure, why did Flipster bother with SD? Because its use is not really about security (see above).
It sounds nice and all, but where can I find any software to work with MPEG 4 now? All I can find is a bunch of wannabe formats wrapped up in AVI. And AVI can't even do MPEG 1.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
With that capacity, I wouldn't even be able to watch the first half of most TmD or SmR releases, lame.
TiVo sync.
Should be possible with the tiny rez, and MPEG-4.
Would be quite cool.
-twb
I'm tired of this bashing the american cell phone network like we're just too stupid to get it. The American market is DIFFERENT. And American consumers just don't CARE about having tiny cameras and streaming video on their cell phone. Its not a technology problem. Its that American consumers don't want it. So why should the network support it?
FunOne
Microsoft has threatned to withold wma support for devices which ship OGG support, so it seems obvious that their level of control would be all the greater for CE based devices....
I can buy a Pocket Pc that does all of these things and more...
That is unless you like the swirling hiss of 64K overly compressed tunes.
If you cut out all the stereo separation, MP3 audio at 64 Kbit/s mono sounds halfway decent over the noise of a moving vehicle.
That and changing your playlist more often than our shorts
I ought to write a program that lets users design pairwise transitions between songs, randomly chooses a playlist, mixes the songs, and then calls lame/oggenc to compress the audio.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The only problem is that MP3 has become a de facto standard for sharing on the web, so if you are trying to download tunes from Gnutella etc., you are going to be downloading MP3s 95% of the time.
Install VMWare (or Virtual PC), and use the guest OS to load the copy-protected music.
Windows: "The file 'Britney Spears - Shitty Pop Song.wma' could not be played, because Windows is running in an emulator, virtualizer, debugger, or other insecure environment. Please reboot the computer, load Windows onto the bare hardware, and try again." Under no circumstances will Microsoft sign the drivers necessary to run Secure Audio Path through vmware.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seriously, this thing simply doesn't have the features to make it a really worthwile solution for portable MPEG4, your best option right now is a decent laptop. This is essentially an MP3 player with some extras thrown in. For starters the storage is extremely expensive, its small, and its slow, USB 1.1? puhlease... How about a hd with usb 2.0 or firewire or, maybe even better, cd rom. Secondly, most of the mpeg4 videos I already have are at too high a resolution to play on this so if I want to watch them I'm going to have to reencode..give me a break... And third it doesn't look like this thing has any sort of video out, so I'm stuck watching it on a miniscule screen..boring... The idea is great and for a first try its good, but to really be usefull theres going to need to be some serious improvement.
I wonder who wants to be the first one to fry, uh, try, one on of these fuckers out.
I like the simulated picture. A boat. Yeah. Sure.
But I bet that when the coroner unplugs this sum'bitch, the picture won't be of a boat. "Debby Does Des Moines" on the DVD's more likely, playing over the recumbent, lifeless forms of some late party people with more money than sense.
If it had a heart shaped tub, you could sell 'em in the Poconos or Niagara. They'll fuck anywhere, anytime.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
yes, and you are a gigantic poseur
Archos has released a 10GB pcmcia storage device. Its really cool. Btw, its on sale at Compusa this week.
CmdrTaco hopes to buy an Archos Multimedia...
;) never actually replies, which makes the company look like a cool-but-dead dotcom...
:-).
Well, I owned an Archos Jukebox recorder, which failed in days... Had to have it changed, and its successor failed in weeks...
Their mail hotline (i'm in Paris so I'm not going to call their 1-800 number
Finally, after hours of bickering at my retailer, I had it changed for an iPod. Now that's cool
This is crap. Sharp just released in Japan a tiny little video player that is more or less the size of a screen. It's pretty close to this but it does Mpeg4 video just like their Japanese Zauruses do. It's about $350 depending on how you convert the yen cost.... but the bread and butter is that this tiny box has all of the functionality of a vcr... including hookups for composite audio and video to record shit in mpeg4! So if _I_ were shoppers looking for something like this, I would at LEAST by the one that has some advantage over an IPAQ or a Zaurus and can record. Oh btw, it uses SD cards for memory and I believe a 128 meg SD card can hold a full length movie in reasonable quality... these things are _COOL_ They measure about 2.5" x 2.5" just a little square box about the same size as a new md player. We should all import stuff from japan rather than buying lackluster american crap like this flipster. Or at least buy an Ipaq or a Zaurus SD-5000 which can do much more for around the same money.