Creative made things official with the Zen X-Fi PMP earlier this week in Singapore, confirming that the music and video capable player would be hitting shelves there imminently. Now, courtesy of Buy.com, we have US pricing, and it turns out the figures are pretty close to like-for-like conversions.
Creative have finally brought their new PMP, the Zen X-Fi, blinking into the sunlight. The WiFi enabled media player had already been spotted surfing the FCC, but Creative’s Singapore division has officially announced the new Zen. Among its talents are wireless streaming and content sync from a PC, together with instant messaging via the onboard Yahoo! and MSN clients.
While Nextar insist on calling their new T30 PMP ”sleek and stylish”, and I’d argue it’s actually more “bland and mildly orange”, what we can probably both agree on is that there’s a fair chunk of functionality for your $99.99. Built around a 3.5-inch 262k color 320 x 240 QVGA display, sadly not a touchscreen, the T30 packs 4GB of onboard storage, an SD slot for expanding that, and measures just half an inch thick.
Amex Digital, who make a variety of home entertainment and HTPC kit, have just announced this, the iMON HD Mobile. Billed as a portable media center, it seemingly comprises a VFD display and IR receiver (with bundled remote) that can control all manner of media software. It’ll also display email, news and weather information.
With the array of Eee-style budget notebooks clamouring to play the role of your companion PC, Microsoft’s UMPC format is being forced to think outside of its traditional box to score sales. Gigabyte have stepped up with the M700; while it may look like a typical 7-inch touchscreen slate, in actual fact it’s running VIA’s 1.2Ghz processor with the new VX800 chipset (with Chrome 9 graphics and video decoding hardware) and is part of the company’s latest IPTV push. The M700 is in actual fact a mobile media center, complete with a dock that packs a digital TV tuner and IPTV streamer.
Check out the video overview of the Gigabyte M700 after the cut
Creative has taken time out from licking its class-action wounds to stuff a few more gigabytes into their Shuffle-rival, the MuVo T200. The PMP, which previously had only been available with 2GB, will now come in a 4GB version. Unlike Apple’s entry-level MP3 player, the T200 has a compact 128 x 32 pixels 65k color display.
Netherlands company Endless Ideas have released a fresh eBook, the BEBOOK. Seemingly a rebrand of the Chinese Hanlin V3, the device uses a 6-inch 600 x 800 e-paper display and is capable of reading .doc, .txt, .pdf, .jpg, .htm and .rtf files. Onboard storage is 512MB, expandable via SD card, and file transfer is courtesy of a USB 1.1 connector. The company claims to be working on Mobipocket support.
E-book manufacturer iRex have announced [pdf link] a new, cheaper version of their iLiad reader. The “Book Edition” drops the original’s WiFi b/g and gains a silver casing, while the price also drops by €150 to €499 ($768). It comes pre-loaded with fifty classic novels and has the same touchscreen for notetaking.
Chinese site iMP3 have been playing with Yoto’s M300, and if you’re unimpressed with Apple’s PMP range (and willing to import or perhaps take a trip to China) then the widescreen media player could tick quite a few of your boxes. For a start, there’s its codec support list: direct support for RM, FLV, RMVB, AVI, mp3, wmv, APE, FLAC and more. Then there’s the 3-inch, 400 x 240 touchscreen display, and the microSD storage.
Samsung’s latest music-only portable media player gets off to a good start by virtue of not being an iPod clone; in fact, the pebble-like YP-S2 is really more of a shiny audio nugget. Of course, you could say that instead they’ve looked to Sony’s DAP range for their inspiration. Available in five colors, the YP-S2 has 1GB of non-expandable storage and saves space by virtue of a removable USB plug that clicks into the 3.5mm headphone socket when needed.
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