Companies like Apex Digital are some of my favorites to watch. Stuck for years as a huge retail producers but second-rate players in the electronics market, these companies start to do interesting things when they make their move toward legitimacy. Apex’s first major move, the ApeXtreme home gaming console, is destined for failure — with the possible exception of a healthy adoption by the PVR tweaking scene. But hold the Apex-branded phone! Here comes a Portable Media Player, the Apex MP-2000, a $400 device with a 20GB hard drive and 3.5-inch 320 by 260 screen that can play MPEG-4, DivX, Motion JPEG, and Windows Media 9 video. Plus it can encode video on the fly at VGA quality — up to 40 hours in MPEG-4 and 80 hours in WMV9. Plus, for better or for worse, the unit can be upgraded to support future DRM schemes, meaning that any future media format should be playable. Apex might just pull something off after all.
As far as we know, these are the first pictures on the web of the Apex MP-2000, and since sharing is caring, we’ve provided a high-resolution version, as well (click the picture).
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