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."

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can buy a Pocket Pc that does all of these things and more...

Re:Quality

[SmittyTheBold]

IMHO, the jury's out on whether properly-encoded MP3s sound better or worse than WMA, but MS really sucks at proving that WMA is better.

At a recent promo event on my campus, they played the same music clip in three formats for us: The RealMedia version, the MP3 version, and a WMA-encoded version. Everybody thought the Real file was horrendous. It was, but then that codec is designed for very low bitrates. Then, they played the next two and had us guess which was which. The sounds were almost identical, but one was louder. Most of us voted for the quieter sounding clip, because it was in general more pleasing to the ear. As it turned out, the louder clip was the WMA.

It seems one of the key things MS does to improve WMA's chance subjective quality tests is EQ and volume tweaking. They jack up a few frequencies and raise the volume overall, to make the sound more "clear." It backfired that day, but I wonder how many people hear such comparisons and really think the louder version of the clip is better, because they're expecting to hear better sound, and that's what they do.

All I can say is, let me set the EQ myself. I know how to adjust for my speakers much better than MS does...and I personally bet their EQ tweaking is based on the "turn it all up!" method home/car stereo know-it-alls like to use. You know, the ones where the bass is +20dB and clipping everywhere, or maybe everything is turned up and the WHOLE FRIGGING THING is clipped...