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Creative Labs to Release Video Jukebox Portable
An anonymous reader writes "Following the success of the Archos line of digital video portables, Creative has announced they will release the Zen Portable Media Player this fall. Like the Archos the unit will sport a 20GB hard drive, 3.8" screen and will be able to record your favorite TV shows on the fly."
The use of the name "Zen" is intentional. The short battery life, will lead to a blank screen partway through your latest pirated movie, leaving you to only contemplate the emptiness of it all.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
The Specs weren't really mentioned. 20GB, but is it USB 2.0 or Firewire (400 or 800)?
Windows XP only, yawn, with full DRM. Not my type then.
3.8" TFT Color LCD- I used to watch portable TVs this size in the 1990's. This isn't appealing to me personally, I don't want to see a tiny Fight Club, with me straining to watch under the few pixels.
Record ability? What kind of input? Composite, S-Video, Component?
All I really like is the record ability, and then able to watch them on a bigger screen, like allow playback on a TV.
Does anyone else think it looks like a Sega Game Gear? Think it munches through batteries even faster with a HD inside? What was it, 3 hours of gameplay on like six batteries?
But can it also record shows I don't like?
ok i was at the creative hq in singapore awhile 2 days back, and the staff there told me that the 20GB version of the zen will be retailing for around SGD$800, to be released sometime in july.
;)
it's got a really slick interface, and it's really light, if you guys wanna know
I think that the niche market Creative is aiming for here is PVR, except the feautre here is that its portable, and capable of showing video without being connected to a seperate display. That, in itself, is probably a poor choice considering that the price far exceeds that of TiVo, etc.
I remember back when Microsoft touted that these media players running Windows would be the death of the iPod, but it seems less and less likely now. The only people who could possibly use this device as a music player primarily must have deep pockets (in both the physical and metaphorical sense).
And THAT will be the problem with these video players. They will either have to have a TON of memory so they can do what an iPod does, or will have to spin the HD up/down alot or just keep it running; which will suck battery life.
I'm not sure how usefull one of these things would be, but I would want a MINIMUM of 5 hours of video playback, and I doubt these devices will be able to achieve that (at least reliably).
I'm worried about battery life and you should be too.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I had the opportunity to beta-review the Creative Zen PMC at Microsoft a few weeks ago, and was fairly impressed with the Creative Zen. Video playback was exceptional for a QVGA screen, Audio playback (mp3 or WMA) was very clean and crisp - in fact, 128-bit mp3's sounded as good on playback as 192-bit or better...and I have very good ears (not Golden, but close). It was fairly lightweight, although heavier that an iPod but had similar weight to any other kind of device. Connection options were to an included USB dock, and USB 1.1 and 2.0 are supported - with USB 2.0 the preferred interface & speed (naturally). We did the usual "shake it" test to check for playback stability during Video and Audio playback and didn't detect any skips or HD resynch problems. An extra feature was the ability to upload image files (jpeg) and be able to do a slideshow. This device might work well for portable presentations, but I can't remember if there is a video-out jack.
.vs Blue" "PDC" episode - where a sweat-drenched Steve Balmer shouted & chanted the word "Developers" over and over and over to the crowd at the 2003 PDC to the point of exhaustion. We had a good laugh at their reaction, which was pretty funny in and of itself.
Battery usage didn't seem to be much of a problem, since the number of renderable bits you're pulling off of the drive to the device's FlashROM or RAM are only needed to render at QVGA size.
The Zen does a very nice auto-synch with pre-defined folders using WMP 10 (yes, we got to preview & play with that as well) - however, the synch of pre-recored media is only PC-to-Device and not Device-to-PC. We didn't get to check-out the TV Recording feature, so I'm not sure if that would be an exception to the unidirectional synching functions.
When I was there the total head-count of non-MS people at this preview was maybe 20. They had people in and out all day with a variety of hardware to test their device with (the prerequsite for attending was to bring your own personal system to the Event to test it against non-HCL, real-world systems and your average user) A fairly decent cross-section of users appeared to be there, with most of them bringing laptops - I elected to bring my desktop system along with me on the 2+ hour drive to Redmond.
The most humorous part was my loading-up on to the Zen of the "Red
Unfortunately, the "Thank You" gift wasn't the usual fair ("pick a Microsoft software title on this table"), but we were given a nice pair of Sennheizer PX-100 headphones and free munchies for the afternoon.
All in all, an excellent device.
--ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!