TechTalk

Nokia's ace new music phone

We were going to do a long post about Nokia’s new music phone the 3250, but ShinyShiny got there first. Suffice to say that it looks great, sports a really cool twisty design that makes it easy to use both the music player and the camera, features a cool two mega pixel camera and has one Gigabyte of memory – which mobile spotters will tell you is twice as much as the Motorola/Apple ROKR and the Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman phone. It also has a neat 262k colour screen, Bluetooth and an FM radio. Music playback is ten hours per charge and users drag and drop tracks on to the device (hurrah).

Doh! That’s almost a long post. Over to your Sony Ericsson and Motorola/ Apple…

Belkin Prepares To Release The TuneFM

Our friends at iPodStudio.com are reporting that iPod accessory company, BELKIN, is about to release a new device known as the TuneFM.

TuneFM is a FM Transmitter that allows you to listen to music on your iPod via any FM stereo receiver.

Belkin explains: “Proximity switches give you total control at the touch of your fingertips, and the LED display indicates FM frequency and memory preset, eliminating the need to use the iPod interface for frequency selection; because the TuneFM is powered by the iPod no batteries are required.”

No price info is available at this point.

375 tunes in your pocket

Would you believe it if we told you a market research group polled 1,062 owners of portable audio devices and found that on average each person was only carrying around 375 songs in their pocket? Granted, the study found that half the users polled were carrying devices only capable of playing 100 or fewer songs (i.e. >512MB capacities)—but the interesting bit was that the iPod users polled only had 504 songs loaded onto their players on average, compared to the 246 songs of non-iPod owners. Without needlessly getting too much into the iPod shuffle’s market penetration and all that, we think it sounds like they either caught a group of early sub-10GB iPod users, or some particularly lazy lazies who didn’t feel like making the most of that capacity. Or maybe they’re just jamming to some serious 25-minute heavy psych jams, guess we’ll never know.

Bamboo iPod Shuffle Cases

This is probably the most original iPod case I have yet to see. A handmade bamboo case produced in Japan may be the latest contemporary trend. Available in Kuro, Tennen and Aka, the cases are said to be available on Sept 6th. Produced by Temas Design, the cases will be selling for 6,000 Yen.

Sony XDR-M1 DAB FM WALKMAN

People are saying that terrestrial radio is dead, but don’t believe them. They’re crazy and they smell. DAB—a digital radio standard popular with people “in other countries,” if we’re to believe the media—is very cool and could possibly improve our general listening experience. However, it is not readily available here yet. That said, Sony has introduced a line of portable DAB players including the XDR-M1.

This digital radio has 40 preset stations and an FM tuner in areas that don’t have DAB reception. Now, if they could give us DAB over here instead of non-stop commercials for Trimspa, perhaps I’d turn on my radio every once in a while.

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Three New iRiver Players: U10, T20 and T30

iRiver (ReignCom) showed at a launch event in Korea three new portable media players. Photos and specifications have been posted on the misticriver discussion board. The most interesting one is the new iRiver U10, which sports a cool thumb interface.

iRiver calls its new user interface D-Click. The buttons are on the borders of the screen. Only the border area is touch sensitive.

The iRiver U10 supports MP4 video, Macromedia Flash, MP3, WMA, OGG and ASF music playback. The U10 has a 2.2" QVGA (320x240) TFT screen.

Besides the nice look the iRiver U10 also features FM-Tuner, Voice recorder, Photo album, txt viewer, direct encoding and games. The iRiver U10 will come in 512MB and 1GB storage configurations.
No word yet when the U10 will be available. It looks like a winner.

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Sony Direct DVD Camcorder, the DCR-DVD7E

Sony has launched their new DVD camcorder which features an odd circular design and direct DVD recording. The DCR-DVD7E records your footage straight to a DVD disc so you can instantly watch the footage on your DVD player.

The DVD7E will feature a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar Lense with 10x optical zoom and a 2.5-inch LCD screen. DVD formats include DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW. No release dates indicated, but expect to the new camcorder to set you back approximately $1200.

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06:08 AM in Digital Cameras, Gadgets, MP3 players, Music | Permalink

May 10, 2005

The best digital music players

It might be easy to forget that there are companies besides Apple Computer that make portable digital-music players. In fact, the market for portable players, which initially used flash memory instead of hard drives, was born way back in 1998.

FORBES Best MP3 players

• Zen Nano Plus Compare Price
• iPod Shuffle Compare Price
• iFP-799
• Rave MP Sport AMP: 1.0 Compare Price
• Rio Forge Sport Compare Price

06:09 AM in Apple iPod, MP3 players, Music | Permalink

May 05, 2005

MPIO-one micro media player

I don't know how practical the MPIO-one is, considering it's a movie player with a ONE inch screen, but it certainly solves the problem of
portable media players being too bulky to really carry around easily. It's flash memory so it's extremely lightweight, just over an ounce, but storage only goes up to 1 GB. The MPIO-one can play mp3 and wma
files as well as jpeg images and text. Of course you'll go blind trying to see anything on the screen, but it can be done. The MPIO-one, unlike so many other media players actually comes with software that will convert many types of video files (ASF, AVI, MPEG, WMV) into an MPEG-4 file that's playable on the device.

I saw lots of movie players of this size at CES in January, and while I was predictably blown away by their tiny size, they weren't exactly very useful. I am pretty skeptical about anybody ever getting the portable movie player right because I'm not sure there's a need. If you've got time to painstakingly convert video at home, you've got time to watch America's Next Top Model (not that I do). I latched on to the idea quickly and had an Archos Multimedia Jukebox with a 2 inch screen several years ago and watched half a season of Buffy on it, but because the battery life was so bad, I had to do it while the thing was plugged in, which, of course, defeats the purpose of having a portable. My niece has one of the newer players and while the battery life is a little better, rarely will it stay alive long enough to let you watch an entire feature-length movie.

MPIO-one will be available in May in Japan, no announcements for the rest of the world yet.

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06:09 AM in Digital Cameras, MP3 players, Music | Permalink

April 18, 2005

Omisys 128MB USB MP3 Player for $34

PC Micro Store offers the Omisys 128MB USB MP3 Player for $34. With shipping starting at $1, that's the lowest total price we could find by $6. Features include a two-line LCD with ID3 tag support and both MP3 and WMA support.

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06:21 AM in MP3 players | Permalink