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 isn't this a phone?

[cyborch]

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.

Re:Why isn't this a phone?

[delta407]

Easy -- call Qwest tech support. If you can ignore the periodic "All representatives are busy" and "This call is monitored for quality" notices, you'll have free, portable music on your cell phone for hours at a time.

Just be careful not to use up all your minutes.

Quality

[delta407]

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.

Re:Quality

[moonbender]

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.

Re:Quality

[HeUnique]

Is that a problem?

Install VMWare (or Virtual PC), and use the guest OS to load the copy-protected music. on the host OS install some "audio grabbing" utility which can grabs whatever the sound card outputs - now play the copy-protected song inside the guest OS and start recording in the host OS..

3 minutes later - you'll have a WAV file which you can either convert to OGG, WMV, MP3 etc without any serious hacking...

The more work they do on copy protecting multimedia - the easier it gets to copy it - ask Sony about their key2audio which could be beaten by a simple marker (heh, there goes few million dollars of investment in copy protection)...

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...

A word of advice for soft/hardware developers

[jimhill]

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.

Well ill have to wait....

[PepsiProgrammer]

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

Undefined Target Audience...

[Tazzy531]

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.

What I wanna see...

[lostchicken]

TiVo sync.
Should be possible with the tiny rez, and MPEG-4.

Would be quite cool.