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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.