At its first family reunion, the Philips PMC7230 Portable Media Center will reconnect with a genealogical tree loaded with televisions, digital video recorders and digital music players - maybe even an iPod or two.
The $350 PMC7230 has a little bit of each in its blood. It’s built like an oversize iPod, or maybe a junior iPhone, with a 3.5-inch screen and 30 gigabytes of memory. It can store music and photos like a digital music player. It can also store video, as in TV programming, like a digital video recorder.
And that family reunion? Wait till the PMC7230 finds out it has an identical twin, the Tatung Portable Media Center. Philips says it shares portable-media-center development, design and the user-interface with several companies, including Tatung. For marketing purposes, Philips has simply put its name on the Tatung player.
This little beauty (4 inches long, less than 4 wide and not even an inch thick) does a lot of things, but every one of them more crudely than its more specialized forebears. Yes, it records live television, but the source - whether TV or cable box - must be left on. Yes, it stores your music, but not with the ease and functional dexterity of an iPod. And, yes, it has a shiny LCD screen - but it’s only 3? inches, measured diagonally.
It is portable, however, which is what makes the PMC7230 and all the other little mobile media players - which, unlike the video iPod, can record your favorite programs, free - so fascinating. The PMC7230 is run by Windows Media Center. If I hadn’t seen the little Windows logo on the menu button between the device’s two controllers, I still would have recognized Windows: It crashed the first time I tried to make a video recording using the PMC7230’s timer.
It was easy to sync, however, digital photos and music - even from my iTunes playlist - using Windows Media Player. The only problem I had was a control pad for navigating the menu that frequently didn’t work.
The PMC7230, a shiny Nano-black with silver trim, obviously can’t download tunes from iTunes. (It’s that Windows vs. Apple thing.) To buy music, you must use services compatible with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure like Napster, Musicmatch and, for video, CinemaNow.