I got a chance to fool around with Samsung’s Portable Media Center last night for a bit at the pre-event press boozing for the DigitalLife show. I should have taken a picture of the YH-999 with something next to it for reference, but you’ll just have to trust me when I say it’s much smaller in person and every bit as nice looking as it appears in person. I sort of hate the Game Boy-style layout of the Creative and iRiver PMCs—I can’t put my finger on it, exactly, but they just seem too big and unwieldy, especially the Creative brick—so something thinner and my tablet-like is much more my speed. That being said, the thing still runs Microsoft’s Portable Media Center software, which means it’s basically only good for watching WMV. That’s great if you’ve already bought into the Media Center platform, but for the rest of us who use a variety of standards, the conversion process is painful.
So all that is to say, if you’re going to hop on the Microsoft portable train, the Samsung has given me the best impression so far.
Also, I learned a little more about TiVoToGo after the jump.
Oh, and I finally got TiVo to commit to a release date for TiVoToGo: Fourth Quarter (okay, I suck at interrogation). Their Q4 starts November 1st, so that’s probably as soon as we could expect it. One important point, though, is that the initial implementation will be copying files to laptops and burning DVDs of recorded shows, using Windows Media Player to manage the DRM and a certain DVD burning software (I don’t recall what it was specifically, but I presume they’ll provide it)—no portable video players for now, although it is in the cards. But burning DVDs! That’s not TiVoToGo; That’s TiVoToStay.
