Our friends at DAPreview have deigned to supply you, dear readers, with the latest and greatest and/or the weirdest and wackiest in portable multimedia hardware.
‘ello, faithful Gizmodo-ists! Today’s a great day to kick off our Daily DAP Delights initiative by your friends at DAPreview.
We’ll try to bring some hot, funny, or generic, must-see DAP news. And when we say “DAP” (Digital Audio Player), we tend to sweep other portable multimedia stuff onto the heap as well. Expect a healthy dose of Portable Video Player/Recorder intelligence, some tidbits on ear gear and multi-purpose marvels, combined with spicy updates on the world of “music download services”.
Our top stories for today:
Nic Digital shows off some weird DAP called “N8130B”, which is still traveling across vaporspace. Notice the oddly familiar graphical interface… it really whips the Lama’s ass.
The guys over at AxiSoft peeped in their latest all-purpose monster, the MobiBOX H28. It can do a lot of cool stuff – take pictures, play videos, eat MP3 and spit it out into your ears – but with a 2-hour battery life and a basic (yet expandable) memory of 128MB, this isn’t going to do much damage.
Ha. There’s a more familiar name – South-Korean iRiver has decided that America should also taste some of their U10-sweetness anytime soon. The U10 is a next-generation, very compact and slick-looking jack-of-all-trades, allowing us to play music, video and even Flash files. Such versatility tends to come with a rather… unattractive price tag, though – and it’s no different for the U10. iRiver America has put up a product page for the U10, which shows price levels of $200 for the 512MB edition… and $250 for the 1GB version. Ouch.
Speaking of iRiver… the Chinese manufacturer Poya seems to be some kind of a iRiver spin-off. Their S100 series MP3 player sure looks slick enough. Goes up to 1GB in size and offers features like an OLED screen, FM tuner, voice recorder and line-in encoder. The company seems to have learned that an expensive battery-replacement program isn’t the way to go, so you can send in your S100’s dead power source and it’ll be replaced for a mere 5 bucks. If you live in China, that is.
We think the Tuny-8 by DyneTel is hot. Although it might look like an Olympus mr:100 rip-off, they actually designed this DAP months and months ago already (we saw it at CES, last January, when it was still under development).
Plus, Dyne Telecom has designed a second version that doesn’t look too much like anything familiar. With a feature set that includes mic jacks, USB-Host, movie playback functionality and whatnot, we’d like to see one of these babies find its way to our test labs.
Sure enough, the PSP is basically the number one portable console when it comes down to multimedia performances… but “Play-Yan Micro” (that’s right… the Gameboy micro version of SP/DS Play-Yan) should allow Nintendo’s upcoming portable device to play MP4/ASF files at a maximum resolution of 352×288 (30fps). Expect to pay about 80 bucks. Now where is that Micro already?
Finally, one of our UK Guardian-reading users claims to have found an interesting passage while browsing said newspaper. Apparently, consumer electronics giant Sony is plunging into the watery depths of “music sharing”.
In what some see as signalling a dramatic shift in the way consumers buy music, the provider, Playlouder, has licensed acts from SonyBMG, the world’s second largest record label, and is confident that the other two big record labels, Universal and EMI, will follow suit.
That’s all for today!