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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."
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.