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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.
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.
iPod is #1 because of marketing, pure and simple. They're selling a branded lifestyle, not electronics.
Designer jeans don't cost so much more because they're necessarily better, or of a higher quality construction, etc..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Until the size, weight, and power consumption of screens that display video and photos are both reduced, and show an increase in quality, I don't believe that a device such as this will win out over the Ipod. It will be either too bulky, or it's screen will be too small for any real use, or the batteries won't last an acceptable amount of time, or a million other problems. Sometimes it's better just to do one thing, and do it well, than to try to do many things, and do all poorly.
The reason for the largish size:
When the weight of the stack of EULAs equals that of the product, Microsoft releases.
What the hell is pre-emptive in this case.. it does something before you tell it to? That's not so much clever as scary
Also, "Real-time".. er, isn't it supposed to be realtime? Would be a tad annoying if it did it 5 mins after (aka Windows ME)
Lastly, just cos everyone else has and I want a go...:
Yes, but does it run linux?
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
Before everyone gets in an uproar over the word 'Microsoft', remember that this device simply follows the standard Microsoft created.
It's based on an ARM processor, so should this device ever take off, the ARM Linux port could easily be customized to take advantage of all the features.
This could also be used as a MP3/video player for your living room stereo and TV, connected to the server via the built in ethernet.
Also, if you look carefully at this larger view, notice the device could make a really cool portable gaming device. Imagine running MAME on this...
Of course, if Linux were loaded on the device we would not need to worry about silly things such as DRM (included in the Microsoft specification.)
I had a bitter experience with Motorola's 9S12DP 1K79X defects (SCI interrupts, PLL registers, BDM bugs, CAN freakiness, etc).
Does anyone know what the roadmap is for their 16bit MCU lines? Perhaps I should be using Renesas or go 8bit AVR...
My Music
My Movies
My TV Shows
My Pictures
Settings
They forgot to include :
My MPAA lawsuits
My RIAA lawsuits
My upcoming jail terms
DirectPay (TM) money transfer
It's about time somebody came up with a Personal Lawsuit Origanizer.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
It needs a better name. One that characterizes its functionality, and portability.
Let me be the first to suggest "omni-pr0n-sent."
Well unlike an ipod it plays video as well and audio. I personally can't wait until these type of devices become affordable to people like me. My personal favorite of this type is the Archos 400 which can also record video as well.
Windows CE - The Pontiac of Operating Systems.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It seems to me that this has got to be an all time low point for announcements of innovation in consumer electronics. Why? Maybe its because of the down turn in the tech-market means new products are not being developed. Another possibility is that microsoft's moves into hardware production(x box,phones) and Hardware specification (palladium, watches, media player, smartScreens) is having a chilling effect on the electronics industry. Recently they (allegedly) tried bankrupt a phone maker and move his technology to a competitor. Shades of Stacker and all the other software companies microsoft co-opted, ruined then bought their technology.
There is little doubt that MS stifled innovation in software. Just the fact that jobs could tweak an open source project to tripple the speed of a web browser over IE, when IE has had a clear field to innovate for five years or more, speaks volumes about the MS innovation stifle field. How could apple even dream they could technologically beat MS in the Power point market, but they did.
Does anyone else find these MS offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
M$ gates announces a recylced idea for a portable that shows sport scores, headlines, and plays RIAA/MPAA approved media. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to switch to 802.11a for the smartScreens and not 802.11g. I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
Thank you for your support.
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.
Walkman, before this, was popular not because it offered equalizer (it didnt), radio (initially, it didnt), multiple headphone jacks etc. It was popular because it was simple.
If you want to make a iPod killer, make a device that is simple to use, good 'OS' (that has AI like remember my favorites and gives them priority in random mode), practical capacity (not insane sizes like 40GB, who has or wants 10,000 songs on their palm?).
Oh, it also has to look cool and not be a commodity. And, did I say, no DRM?
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!
This functionality exists in these two devices. They are small, portable (0.5 kg) with a decent battery life (2.5~3hrs watching divx) have MStick and CF interfaces, USB 2.0 and touch screen, 256 (u50) or 512 (u70).
True they are expensive at USD 1,500 and USD 1,700
But they are a full-blown computer with a Celery M 900 o Centrino 1Ghz.
I'd rather buy one of these.
Does it come with a magnifying lens so I can see what's happening when I play my TV shows and videos? Maybe it's just me, but I find that any video screen smaller than about 10" is completely unwatchable. To make matters worse, mobile video is even more difficult to see on the go because of the variations in ambient light intensity and the jostling motion of walking/commuting/etc.
These mini-video players look like a poor solution to a non-problem.
While thinking philosophically, we see problems in places where there are none. -Wittgenstein
MEC Station Deluxe
6.5" 16:9 Aspect Ratio Screen
20gb, 40gb, 80gb, flavors ($599, $699, $799)
Compact flash support (so you can dump pics from a digicam card STRAIGHT onto the MEC, i.e. if you're on a vacation and need a lot of pic space but only have one card)
TV-out
~4.5 hour battery life
and for the supported media formats...
MPG-1, MPG-2, MPG-4 (DiVX, XViD, RM), JPG, GIF, BMP, WAV, MP3
and in the future...
TXT, OGG
Plus it runs embedded linux variant (not sure which one).
I have one, and it's out NOW.
It rocks. It rocks...
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/