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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."
More ways to carry pr0n round in my pocket! Yay for technology!
The words of Alanis Morrisette seem appropriate to the occasion: "I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is giving a high five."
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
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.
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"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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 ;-)
TiVo sync.
Should be possible with the tiny rez, and MPEG-4.
Would be quite cool.
-twb
The word "unsupported" does not necessarily mean it doesn't work. It's likely that it works perfectly well under Win2K, but they haven't yet trained their phone drones to handle questions about using it with Win2K.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
The idea is that you won't be able to choose anymore when they enforce strict DRM. Lure customers into using a propietary, incompatible format with features, advertisement, price, candy, whatever, and when everyone uses your software and the alternatives are insignificant, you're basically free to do whatever you want.
If everyone had started using WMA when MS introduced it, to a degree when getting even MP3s (not even mentioning OGGs) is nigh to impossible by legal or illegal means, MS could then enforce strict DRM and whatever they want. Or, for another example, when Microsoft dominated the desktop market, they could release whatever buggy software they wanted and people would still buy it, since there were no significant, compatible alternatives (or so people thought).
I don't necessarily believe that, but as I said, that's the idea.
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