Slashdot Mirror
First Portable Media Centers Hit Store Shelves
An anonymous reader writes "After months of speculation and hype, the first Portable Media Center based on Microsoft's 'Windows Mobile software for Portable Media Centers' has finally hit store shelves. The Zen Portable Media Center, from Creative Labs, is now available at Best Buy and Fry's Electronics, priced under $500. That money basically buys a 3.8-inch color LCD screen, ultra-fast USB 2.0 port to transfer video, music, and digital photos from your PC, and an internal 20 GB hard drive."
What manner of DRM has been built in?
What dissapoints me is that it only holds 20B. Larger models are definitely needed. 20GB will fit my music collection just fine, but when I start putting movies on it I'm going to need a bit more. Hell, there are people who buy 80GB players _just_ for music.
I honestly don't understand the reasoning behind these products. These are marketed and designed for use from the point of view people WANT to carry movies and photos around with them. Sucessful portable devices don't get in the way when they are not being AND are so simple to intereact with that one doesn't think about using them.
These look like little more than toys for people who buy things because they are new. Novelty, nothing less, especially at that price, useability, and size.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I would have preferred something that would support more formats, such as xvid, ogg vorbis, etc.
divx would be nice too, but there would be a licensing issue.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Look, I don't know whether the original poster's claim is true or not, but..
If you read what he's actually written, as opposed to what you assumed he wrote, you'll see his comment is specifically about video, whereas your reply mentions only audio. In short, you're discrediting a claim that he didn't make and calling him a jackass to boot.
Calm down, take a deep breath, and read the whole sentence, mmmmkay?
Microsoft always wants to extend Windows even into areas where it does not belong. A handheld running Windows? What on earth for? Now this too? No thanks. Give me a Palm, give me an iPod, give me a simple tool that works well and elegantly.
I don't know, I imagine the market is at least as big as the market for the Gameboy, and that's done alright.
My question here is how much of that price tag reflects the license tax to Microsoft? The hardware can't cost more than $150 by itself even at retail prices... even the LCD doesn't justify it. The software itself also doesn't justify the price... maybe another $100 for that so.... IMHO the license is half or more of the purchase price there. Surely the market can come up with a better or comperable offering for much less...I'm not buyin' it, figuratively or literally.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
$100 hot seller - sorry, that makes absolutely no sense at all. do you have any sense of how much things cost? you can't afford it doesn't mean it's not worth the price.
are you going to lug 6 lbs of laptops everywhere? are you going to deal with the fact laptop is much "bulkier" when you watch a movie on the screen since you still need the keyboard to go somewhere?
Ultralight laptops will cost more, but not much more. We have that formfactor in the laptop form already. On the other hand if I (and millions other Americans) do have a laptop, there's even less incentives to buy a PMC. The ROI is simply not there.
$100 hot seller - sorry, that makes absolutely no sense at all
I know, but the whole product makes about as much sense as a car that can only turn one way, but not the other. It's half the price of the regular car and eats just as much gas but can only turn right. Limited market, limited appeal, absolutely no reason for anyone to want one.
If $100 is not good, then for $500 I want WiFi connectivity, back-end download portal with somefree content (real movies, not trailers and promotional crap) and wireless radio streaming. Mind you that a $600 laptop will do that (except the movie part would have to be Suprnova), so if you take away my keyboard, please put back something else.
I would have thought it would be as simple as:
- Hook up device to cable
- Schedule recording
- Watch
Instead, you have to:- Hook up your computer to cable
- Go to your PC and schedule a show
- Once it is done, have the software crunch the video to be transfered to the device
- Hook up the device to the computer
- Transfer the video over to the device
- Watch
How much more would it have cost to include a tuner with the unit?! Based on a post above, the unit can do video compression. So, until that happens, I am not too interested in the device as there are too many hurdles to jump to get out the door.Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
I would like to point out that NT 4.0 and Win95/98 ran great on "old" PCs anywhere from a DX4/100 to a Pentium 166 or Pentium 200 (non-MMX with smaller caches). Since you can buy a Palm Pilot with a 400Mhz XScale processor, it wouldn't seme unwise to leverage the already stable core of Windows and its stable support for mime types (hacked as it is around file-name extensions) rather than develop a brand new OS.
It's akin to using X11 on the Zaurus. Would you argue that is bloat, and that they should write a whole new framebuffer interface, etc? No.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Anyone else think it's ironic or perhaps moronic to call a *media* device Zen?
Sheesh, Zen is about as big of a buz word these days as I dunno some kinda crazy buz word.
I'm pretty sure most people don't really even know what Zen is, and if they did, they'd wonder why people call stuff Zen. It has nothing to do with motorcycle riding.
"Microsoft always wants to extend Windows even into areas where it does not belong."
./ posts about of Linux on a wristwatch et al people tend to root and cheer. Personally, I agree with your sentiment. A large scale general purpose OS can only consume more than it's share of scarce resources on a micro-device. ;)
Yet when
However, in the future as computational power and memory resources grow ever smaller, the amount of bloat for the OS may matter less. For all we know, we'll see sixth generation "portable media centers" capable of playing DoomIII of course the display will look like crap on the holographic emitter and controlling the gameplay with hand gestures will be a chore, I'm sure it will be a hit for the hardcore game enthusiest
20gb is not gigantic but it helps keep the price sane and is more then enough for 20 high quality movies or a shit load of tv captures.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ultralight laptops will cost more, but not much more.
You find me an ultralight laptop of about the size of that media player that costs "not much more" than 500 bucks. Seriously.
Like you I am not sure if the media players hit the market sweet spot in the dimensions of small, versatility, and price, many people will perceive a 600 dollar big notebook a better deal as you point out. But I do know there's no subnotebook that comes close to both the price and size areas of this media player.
My cousin has a powerbook and he hooks it up to the tv all the time, so I'm assuming the powerbook can do the same. Anyone can verify?
Powerbooks have S-Video ports built in. A short cable is included that turns the S-Video into an RCA port.
You do realize that there's absolutely no way you'll get through 80GB of music OR video on a single battery charge?
You do realize that people don't load each day's music selection into their iPods as part of their morning rituals, don't you? Why do you think you have to watch/listen to your entire collection in a single charge?? Plug it in when you get home at night, unplug and take it with you in the morning. Listen to whatever subset of your collection you want during the day.
Intelligent Life on Earth
With USB being more ubiquitous and USB 2.0 being basically the same speed (although technically faster than firewire) it's a good choice. As much as I like firewire USB's not a bad idea for a product like this.
Presently here, but not there.
Sorry, sorry, I know, it's the whole WinTel marketing machine, but if they really REALLY wanted an "ultra fast" port for moving all that data around, they'd've gone with FireWire 800. Even plain vanilla FireWire is faster than USB 2.0. Sure, USB's THEORETICAL maximum speed is faster than FireWire 400, but in practise it's a lot slower.
That said, it probably is fast enough. But ultra fast? HA!
What dissapoints me is that it only holds 20B. Larger models are definitely needed. 20GB will fit my music collection just fine, but when I start putting movies on it I'm going to need a bit more. Hell, there are people who buy 80GB players _just_ for music.
Yeah, but how many people with 80GB mp3 players really listen to 80GB worth of music over the course of a week/month/year? The only person I know with a 40GB iPod listens to the same worn out dance albums from 1998 over and over and over and over . Then he makes fun of my 4GB mini, which has new music rotated onto it weekly.
I guess what I am driving at is that you can effectively manage your media regardless of whether or not your entire collection of stuff fits on it. 20GB is enough for a damn lot of movies in divx; more than I would watch on a 2 week vacation. It seems more than enough if you plan on removing items you have viewed enough times, too.