Microsoft Portable Media Center Reviewed

dhopton writes "The first public review of the PMC that I've seen is interesting. It's critical in places, but also praises. It also covers Windows Media Player 10 to some extent. Overall, I'm looking forward to reviews of the non-Creative devices."

Comments

Just Great!

[intekra]

More goodies to spend my unemployment check on!

DRM?

[russint]

DRM-Enabled media players? No thanks.

Re:DRM?

[e9th]

Yeah. Gouker even seems to feel that licensing, rather than owning, music is the way to go. Maybe it is if all you listen to is here today, gone tomorrow top-40 crud that you'll be bored with in a month.

Robotic Women?

[joeldixon66]

From TFA: And please, I don't mean to get you worried at this point, I don't find them attractive in a sexual way or anything like that, I'm much more drawn to a nice 5'8" red head than anything made of silicon, LOL, err, no pun intended.

If only there was a way to combine the red head with the silicon. *ponders*

Homestar...

[hypermike]

I'm Corey Gouker (obviously); I'm a Media Center MVP who hangs out in the Microsoft newsgroups...
I'm pretty much an average geek...

As Homestar would say: More like NOT AVERAGE GEEK!

Links to mirrors of video and photos

[tao_of_biology]

Hey, since it's getting slashdotted already. ;)

He has a link to mirrors of his photos and videos of the device (which I'm mainly interested in anyway). They are:

WMV: External Overview of Creative Zen PMC (temporarily down) Mirror 1 Mirror 2
WMV: Demo of Portable Media Center UI (temporarily down) Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Gallery of Images from Creative Zen PMC Mirror 1 Mirror 2

My favorite quote

[PunkPig]

"...so I had high hopes that they might be a breakthrough device that would fit my needs perfectly. Something that would really do damage to Apple's iPod."

This guy has a real hate on for Apple doesn't he?

"non-Creative" devices...

[gargonia]

If it's a Microsoft product I'm pretty sure you can count on it being non-creative.

What about Archos?

[cj171]

Archos has had these kinds of portable media players out for at least a year now..with no drm, and recording from video sources to mpeg4 or divx I believe. Definitely something fishy in that blog

Yeah, this is going to TOTALLY smoke the iPod.

[Moofie]

I mean, come on! It's full of Microsoft goodness! Just look at the fun you can have trying to turn it on!

I unplug it and try turning it on, it doesn't come on, I take the battery out and pop it back in, still nothing. Keep the battery out and plug it in, still nothing, then I pull the power out slowly and with the plug in half way the screen goes white. I was baffled. I thought the device might be dead. After letting it charge again for another hour or so I tried again, still nothing. I tried some tricks to get it to turn on that sometimes work with electronics and such. Like holding the power button in and popping the battery in and plugging it in, trying the reset button, holding the Start (aka green) button and pressing power, everything I could come up with. Finally, somehow the device turned on.

Yeah, I'm going to break my iPod into teeny little pieces and use the polycarbonate shards to open my veins before I buy one of these POSes.

Re:Maybe it's just me but...

[dasmegabyte]

You may be on to something. Check this out. If this is as it seems, Corey's not a 20 year old student...he's been working with Microsoft for 8 years.

Fucking insidious.

Re:Maybe it's just me but...

[huchida]

I believe it's a setup too. Google "Corey Gouker"... Wade through some of the results, interesting what you'll find.

This is either the biggest-- and most clueless-- Microsoft fanboy in existence, or Microsoft's ad department is creating a fake blogger (actually, blog community) to give their products some "street cred."

Article Summary

[Sinner]

Corey Gouker is a 20 year-old geek who likes 5'8" redheads. He sits on 204 GB of music. He has one media device. His hobbies including hanging out in Microsoft newsgroups.

He is reviewing Microsoft's "iPod killer". It is gonna be like iTunes, except instead of buying music, you rent it. We all know this is a foolproof business model. It is loaded up to the gills with more of that tasty DRM that everyone loves.

The first thing he did was plug it in to the mains. Then he tried to take it apart. I think we have a potential Darwin Award nominee, folks. Then he had trouble turning it on.

The device has a 400MHz XScale CPU and 64Mb of RAM. It can play videos on its 320x240 screen. It performs well, apart from the artifacts and frame drops.

The device has cables coming out of every side but one. The good news is, you can add blue LEDs and make it really sexy.

Battery life is 22 hours for audio and 7 hours for video. The device weighs as much as a can of coke.

If you scroll to the bottom, you can download a 23Mb video. I'm too bored to watch it, maybe someone else can post a summary of that.

For an alternate view..

[jlouderb]

I'm pretty down on the PMC. I put my reasons together here on ExtremeTech. It's not a review, but I've had hands-on time with all of them (real reviewers are forbidden to post a review until the Non-Disclosure expires sometime in the near future).

Then, after being raked over the coals by Microsoft apologists, I revised my opinions. The PMC is actually a brilliant trojan horse that'll let Microsoft take over the porn industry!

jim

Article Summary

[callipygian-showsyst]

For those who don't want to read the whole thing.

Hi! My name is Corey! I love myself. I'm a big geek and take lots of photos and have a big movie collection. And I like girls! I spend all my time on the Internet chatting about stuff

I spend lots of money on electronic things. And because I'm so important and special I got a Portable Media Center! It's way cool! It's not an iPod! It's something different

I have such a large movie collection, I'll wear once of these out a week! I have lots of on-line friends who love to read my blog. I live in my parents basement

Even though I just said I'm an ultra high-tech geek, I serve this web site on a slow DSL connection from my l33t Linux box. Please use a mirror!