PMP Today

The ear-clips headphones model NVE-100 from VIBE apparently vibrates on your ear for a more thrilling enjoyment of portable music or movie. There isn’t really much more to say about this except that it will cost Koreans 99,000 KRW or $107 US starting July. To me, this looks like a good gear to bring into a movie for your girl. An hour and a half of pure titillation.
[via aving] Read the rest »

Mustek’s new 638 PMP was shown at CeBit and all we knew then was that it had 1GB of onboard memory and a 2 megapixel camera. Now we know more.

Here are a few other details of the PMP638R (the”R” must stand for “recording”):

dimensions: 101 x 61 x 19mm, weighs 120g

screen: 3 inches

file support: MP3, WMA, ASF, WAV, AVI, JPEG

other features: USB 2.0, line-in AV, TV out, SD/MMCmemory extension

battery life: 2.5 hours video playing

[via gmp3]

Screenshots showing a new firmware for the N95 labeled v12.0.013 has just been spotted. Symbian-Guru didn’t see much to improve on the original firmware but it noted that a new Nokia Maps will be preloaded. More importantly, it looks like Nokia’s GPS will be boosted with A-GPS (Assisted-GPS), which can be used in urban areas to speed up GPS location with the help of an assistance server communicating with your GPS system over a cellular network. A-GPS is reliable enough to be used in E911 emergency services. The great thing about using A-GPS is that it gets better the more you use it, Symbian-Guru clocked GPS with A-GPS at 17 seconds faster than GPS alone.

[via crunchgear, symbianguru]

If you’re looking for an audio-video player, you might consider the multi-featured M6 by Meizu. Now this is not the SE version, which is a superslim player with only 7mm in thickness, but rather an 8GB version, which has just been made available in France. The M6 has a 2.4-inch 320 x 240-pixel 262k color TFT screen. It’s not a hard disk player like the Zune (entry directly below) but it has some pretty dazzling specs (reade GMP3’s review) for the price of a Zune €199 - well almost at $268 US.

[via gmp3] Read the rest »

Zune is on its way to selling a million players within the month as it eats up more shares of the hard-disk players market. Zune, which is second only to iPod, has improved its market share last April to 9.2 percent, thanks largely to the newly released Pink Zune. Zune’s current 11.3 percent market share is its highest ever. Zune players reached 10.2 percent of the hard-disk market in December 2006, a month after its release. It has declined after that until the turn around in April.

Microsoft cannot however take credit for this recent turnaround for Zune, as price cuts by retail stores pushing Zune’s price to as low as $199 would have helped sales a great deal.

[via electronista]

Samsung has developed a 1.8-inch 120GB-capacity hard-disk drive that should fit right into the Zune Player. The Spinpoint N2 Series “features a 4,200rpm spin rate, PATA/ZIF interface with 8MB cache memory, a 15,0ms seek time and a two second Drive Time to Ready.” It’s also pretty quite quiet because it’s made by Samsung. MSRP is $249.

Here’s what the Samsung press release has to say about the N2 hard disks:

“The N2 Series has been developed specifically for portable consumer electronic applications where low noise, vibration and power consumption for longer battery life are key to success. These robust and rugged drives feature best-in-class environmental and acoustical specifications as well as decreased power consumption from the low operating voltage system-on-chip configuration. In addition, perpendicular recording technology enhances data reliability while dynamic Flying-On-Demand ensures better data signals.”

With the MSRP, Microsoft might as well put a phone and PDA functions on the Zune player.

[via zune-online]

We don’t have much details about the W10 player, which is supposed to be a complete PMP with a virtual dial pad interface, VoIP and WPS (WiFi positioning system) functions. Not unless you can read Japanese…. More about WPS. It’s supposed to be an alternative to GPS and works on Windows XP and Windows Mobile. It tracks a WiFi device anywhere in the world and locates it on a map. It’s a simple application without the need of an add-on. Currently works in 25 cities in the U.S. Read more from this site.

[via engadget] Read the rest »

Here’s another PMP Watch. They’re becoming the dark horses of the portable media player and multimedia gadget industry (what do you think?). Found this one scouring YouTube for fun bits about the iPhone. The video watch doesn’t have a mark and the YouTube poster doesn’t help us on that account. He bough this one at eBay after searching for “MP4 video watch.” This must be the model, dubbed New Generation which is a 2GB model. It has a 1.5-inch OLED screen with 260k colors and 128 x 128-pixel resolution. It plays MTV videos with MP3, WMA and MP4 support. It has FM, USB and e-Book functionality. It comes in black, both priced at $43. If you want to purchase one, there’s still 4 days and 11 hours left.

[product page]

American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu says that Apple is being pressured by the market to begin making cheaper iPhone versions. The iPhone, which will come on June 29, is priced at $499 for the 4GB and $599 for the 8GB. “Apple needs to round out its iPhone product line at lower price points (similar to iPod) if it expects to replicate the success of its iPod with sales of 100 million units,” Wu said. Last month, it was rumored that iPhone is working on a cheaper, smaller and non-touch screen version of the iPhone. Wu summed up what he thinks is iPhones market advantage: “We believe one overlooked advantage iPhone may have over other smartphones is that when making calls, its virtual dialer has no extra clutter, and it is likely easier to dial unprogrammed phone numbers than on fixed QWERTY keyboards.”

[via gmp3, article]

Who would buy Microsoft’s Surface? The Sarcastic Gamer tries to answer the question: “One day your computer will be a big-assed table… Instead of using one of today’s more popular compact devices to get directions to where you’re going, why not use a device the size of a small car.” Er, you get the drift.

[sarcasticgamer]