Slashdot Mirror
What A Portable Media Center Might Look Like
An anonymous reader writes "From the Redmond's answer to iPOD dept... While wandering the exhibitor aisles at Embedded DevCon, we were drawn to this slick looking reference design board in the Freescale (formerly Motorola Semiconductor) booth. The Portable Media Player Reference Design, a.k.a. "Jazz", is based on a Freescale i.MX21 embedded processor, runs Windows CE, and is compliant with Microsoft's Portable Media Center (PMC) standard. PMCs, Microsoft's answer to the iPOD, will initially support digital music and videos, digitally recorded television shows, and digital photos."
There are several reasons this is not an iPod killer per se. Mostly because it does not beat the iPod in any of the areas in which the iPod excels: being a very small, very light, fairly durable, tightly enclosed music device with good battery life and a nice interface. MS's stuff is going to be necessarily larger, necesarily heavier, necesarily more precarious unless they ruggedize the HELL out of those LCDs and reinforce the plastic grating over the speaker. Battery life will probably be about the same as a portable DVD player, and if the interface is anything like Pocket Media Player, it's got NOTHING on the iPod.
In short: this looks like it has exactly the same features and price point as the device I traded in for my iPod, a Toshiba PocketPC. And just like the PocketPC, it'll have limited appeal which becomes even MORE limited when Joe Q. Fancydevice realizes how hard it is to get first run movies onto it...i mean, how fast can the processor be in these things and still keep battery life?
Still, competition is good for the industry. The market pressure will force Apple to make iTunes even better (and there's room for that). But I don't think they have too much to worry about...a bigass laptop wannabe is NOT in the same league as a tiny little music device.
Nice looking board, no doubt about it, but to really make a splash they ought've made it 16:9 instead of 4:3. Just like the old car commercial says, "Wider is better."
Anyone know if this will support Ogg? I'm still regretting putting my whole music collection into OGG format. IRiver is still a little expensive for me.
My Pocket PC can play video and audio files, play emulated NES games, browse the web, and a whole lot more...
You need to re-encode your mpegs or avis to a PPC friendly bitrate, but its not that tough.
You think, they would do some additional market research to possible, names. JAZZ, is so closely associated with iOmegas' Jazz Drive, and their infamy is well, known. I wouldn't want to be even remotely associated to that company.
Some kind of Name a little more media savy or Market Targetable.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!