JVC Announces Media-Centric Pocket PCs

An anonymous reader writes "infoSync World writes about two new high-end Pocket PC models from JVC, the MP-PV131 and MP-PV331. Running on Windows Mobile 2003, the Pocket PCs boast 128 MB SDRAM, built-in Wi-Fi and MPEG4 video and audio streaming and capture capabilities. The new devices are also equipped with software for use along with JVC camcorders. The new models will be available in the U.S. in September at $499.95 US and $599.95 US respectively"

Comments

It goes without saying

[mao che minh]

I would imagine that almost all future "high end" PDAs and Pocket PCs will be heavily media-centric - considering that most already are (the biggest selling points that marketers tend to focus on when advertising their newest hand-held is MP3 playback, image veiwing and manipulation, digital photography, and video capture and playback). Afterall, the PDA has long since evolved past a simple calculator and phone book. I always assumed that many average users upgrade to a Pocket PC for more power, power which is usually required to drive digital media (sure, you can play MP3s on a PDA, but high end media and their associated tools tend to require more power then a low end Sony Clie).

Too expensive

[Graspee_Leemoor]

Is it just me, or is the price of PDAs creeping up and up?

It doesn't affect me because I stopped using PDAs some time ago because of issues with battery life. I'd sooner trust my notes, addresses etc. to paper these days than an electronic device- and I'm a geek!

graspee

Re:Too expensive

[rice_web]

Well, when the specs of PDAs aren't "creeping up and up" but rather increasing exponentially, it takes time for the prices to settle. The fact that nearly all the chips are coming from Intel can't help lower prices any.

This, and a lack of demand in the handheld market has kept prices high. Everybody already has a Palm--a IIIxe or older--and most everyone feels that they have enough.

Re:Too expensive

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Belive it or not, Pocket PC prices have been falling steadily over the last few years. The JVC device costs less that $500 and includes 802.11b and several card slots, but a first generation iPaq cost upwards of $550 before you bought the expansion sled. To spend that kind of money on a Pocket PC now, you'd need to buy a Phone Edition version, and even that's getting pretty hard.

This is because of the economics of the device market more than anything else. Customers will pay a premium for useful features like 802.11b, but the BOM cost is heavily driven by the screen, the battery, and the CPU. It's more profitable to take a sloppy but reliable reference design and simply slap a few premium features on it than it is to do the extensive optimization of circuit board layout and power supply to make a profit at the low end.

I smell a smash hit.

[rice_web]

It works with JVC cameras and boasts WiFi, which means that small television stations can now act like the pros. Doing live broadcasts that require many angles--like sporting events--requires cameras with expensive antennas, etc. Now, these small stations simply add this $500 device and they're good to go.

Re:I smell a smash hit.

[rco3]

I smell something less savory.

Even consumer DV cameras use 25 Mbit/s video streams. You might (might!) get one channel of video over an 802.11g link. To do multiple angles means multiple access points - that's a separate ethernet run over to the access point, which has to be fairly close to the camera... and trust me: even relatively inexpensive camera cables are more durable than Ethernet.

This is all assuming that the Pocket PC is capable of actually taking the DV stream in and firing it back out over WiFi - presumably 802.11b, which can't handle the datastream anyway.

I'm betting (having been there, thanks) that very few small TV stations are willing to trust multicamera setups to DV and Windows of any stripe.

It's a nice thought, though. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, OK?

Re:I smell a smash hit.

[rice_web]

Well of course, a typical camera goes at about 10MBytes a second, right? (though those video editing machines require upwards of 30) But.... that's overkill.

I'm in the cable advertising business. My father started the business two decades ago, and I've been working for him. The cable spots that he runs in most of his markets are MPEG-1, taking 30 seconds of commercial footage into a 10MB file. That's 2.6Mbits a second, much less than you've said above. Plus, the quality is more than acceptable.

Re:I smell a smash hit.

[rco3]

Ah, advertising. Now it all makes sense.

"a typical camera goes at about 10MBytes a second, right?"

Wrong. 25 Mbit/sec is the rate at which consumer camcorders transfer video over Firewire. That's a little over 3 MBytes/sec. Pro DV formats (DVCPro, etc.) are 50 Mbit/s (6+ MBytes/s). 802.11b is 11 Mbit/s, which includes all the overhead and so your actal data throughput is considerably smaller.

Second, consumer cameras do NOT allow you to transcode on the fly, and so they CANNOT spit out video data at lower rates. When you run your MPEG-1 spots, those have been transcoded by a standalone PC (probably) to a lower bitrate, and a different encoding method.

You're now asking a PocketPC 2003 handheld to do real-time, on the fly video transcoding. It doesn't have the horsepower, and it's not stable enough for a production environment. Plus, you've got to have some way of switching between cameras for live events, which means DEcoding the data at the receiving end - figure on a PC per camera. If you're not going to switch live, then simply sticking a DV tape in each camera and doing everything in post is much simpler and more reliable.

Third, "more than acceptable" quality is fine if you're doing cable advertising. It looks like shit when you're doing live production. Looking "not bad, considering" doesn't get you return gigs.

So, to sum up:

Video bitrate is too high for WiFi.

PocketPC can't transcode in realtime.

Transmitted video over WiFi has to end up in a form that can be switched.

Simply putting tapes in the camcorders is MUCH simpler if you don't need to switch live anyway.

You might consider changing your .sig.

Meh

[SHEENmaster]

All PDA development seems to be geared toward media and organization.

Some of us (geeks/coders) just want a portable UNIX system. I wish the Debian/Zaurus port wasn't abandoned. X11 on such a thing would kick some serious ass.

Anyways, if you want more than a gameboy/organizer, check out the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. The 5600 really skimps on RAM, so ignore it.

Re:Meh

[mao che minh]

How economically feasible is it to sell a decent PDA with a portable Unix OS and develop Unix drivers for it's hardware, and then write and/or port applications to it? How much of these could you hope to sell? This is what the open source community is for: if you desire a small niche, take it upon yourself to develop it - or even better, find the rest of that small niche and develop it together.

As a side note, the intricities of X11 are not well suited to a PDA. It just simply isn't "light" enough.

When will the CE line end?

[arth1]

The differences from old Windows CE aren't that much, except for added multimedia functions, wireless functions and CPU and memory speed.
The loser, now as with earlier new PDA OS versions, is battery life.

When will they do something about this? When they find out that MPEG4 is only useful if the battery actually last through a long movie?

epensive but extremely mobile

[sukottoX]

Features that both JVC iO Pocket PCs share include the JVC AV player that supports MP3, WAV and Ogg Vorbis compressed audio files, as well as AVI (MPEG4) and ASF (MPEG4) video files.

Other shared features of the two models include 128 MB of SDRAM, 32 MB of Flash ROM, a CompactFlash Type II expansion slot, an SDIO capable SD/MMC Card expansion slot, a 16-bit (65,536 colours) 3.5" transflective TFT display, a USB client port and a non-exchangeable 1100 mAh Lithium Polymer battery.

Sure, they're expensive, but this would be a great little toy to take on a bus or a short trip where a laptop would be cumbersome. (not to mention the bathroom at work) ;-)

Convienence

[mao che minh]

Yes, they (cheap PCs) can. But, that cheap 233mhz system also utilizes and IDE drive, a PCI bus with a PCI video card with at least 16MB of memory, a large operating system complete with at least 200MB of files, and a myriad of drivers and programs. A simple low-end PDA doesn't have the luxury of these things. Pocket PCs or "high-end" PDAs like the $400+ Sony Clies have all kinds of innovations that can. These innovations cost money.

Besides, you can't lug a cheap 233mhz Pentium system around in your pocket. You pay for convienence.

Funny, I'm not at all excited....

[King_TJ]

Seriously, unless it's just me, I sense a general malaise about the whole PDA thing. Companies keep launching the "next greatest thing in pocket PCs", but I just don't see mass numbers of people adopting/using them.

Basically, they still feel like "toys for the man who has everything" and "nifty prizes to win in a contest" more than "must have" items.

I'm still using a Kyocera 6035 combo cellphone/PalmPilot, and I really don't find myself needing such things as "128 megs. of RAM" or streaming video in it. I simply keep a few important addresses and phone numbers in it, use an applet every once in a blue moon that turns the phone into an alarm clock, and regularly read news items on it via "AvantGo" software.

As people keep saying (but the manufacturers don't seem to be listening), long battery life is more useful than thousands of colors and tons of storage space. When I need a computer, I want a full-size keyboard to type on and a screen large enough to read easily. I'll deal with the extra size of a slim laptop. When I don't, I just want something with the basics in it - and no extra flash.

Check out those prices

[Pettifogger]

Did anyone else notice that these prices are creeping awfully close to that of a laptop? I know they're bigger, but laptops are getting thinner and are usually fully-fledged computers. If I wanted to watch movies and do heavy media applications, I'd much rather have a laptop.

I don't have a PDA (I still keep a spiral bound small calendar, nothing I've seen beats it so far, though I keep hoping) but if I did, it'd be more for scheduling/calendar and keeping track of phone numbers.

Re:Check out those prices

[Billly Gates]

This is all marketware by Microsoft in order to kill Palm.

I agree. If you do professional video editiing, an Apple Powerboor or Ibook is a much better buy.

Come on guys. You need storage and not a 64 meg stick to do video editing.

I pefer palms because they are best at what they are designed to do. That is act like a pda.

The apps are great too, including the browser for the color handsprings, free vnc, ssh, and vpn clients, etc. Try that with a pocket pc?

The most important thing is battery life though and I am sure these dvd playing large Apple Newtons, grrr I mean pocket pc's have shitty battery life if you try watch mpegs all day with them.

i'd like to see...

[scotty777]

A cheap machine ($200-$250)
NO video (adds expense)
MP3 player
802.11g
-- easy ad hoc connection mode with nearby friends
-- IM / IRC ad hoc over the 802.11
-- email via any open 802.11 WAPs
-- share tunes (like with Kazaa), ad hoc over the 802.11
-- simple PK crypto for "private" IM conversations
Java on board (so apps/games can readily be written)
small keyboard (like on palm titanium)

Is that hardware price point impossible for the features?

Yes, but...

[lpret]

You're almost comparing apples to oranges. That PDA that ran on 2 AA batteries for 4 weeks had:

• 4 shades of black
• 4 Mhz processor
• Had Address book, Notes, Calendar, To-do list, calculator.

Now, my Toshiba e740 with the extended battery has:

• Color screen capable of full-screen video
• 400 Mhz processor
• Address book, Notes, Calendar, To-do list, graphing calculator, universal remote, e-mail, full web browsing (with Javascript), and two expansion slots for hardware or up to 1 GB each of memory.
• I stream and control audio wirelessly from my computer to my e740 which I can then listen to whenever I'm connected to the internet.
• The battery lasts 11 hours of constant wifi usage

Now, these are two completely different beasts and the one concession that has to be made is battery life. Everything else is much better in the new handhelds.