Portable Media World (a spanking new sister site to our favorite French gadget site, Akihabara News) has a review of the HMP-A1, the second-generation video player from Sony. They’re impressed by its fit-and-finish, but it’s clear from the review that Sony has crippled the device, forcing the user to go through two different programs to copy audio and video to the unit (and no ATRAC, hilariously), as well as reencode most video before transferring it over (it supports MPEG 1/2/4 but not MPEG4 derivatives like DivX or XviD, apparently). Battery life varies wildly depending on how much decoding the HMP-A1 must do, but even when gnawing on the relatively dense MPEG2 files it manages around a 4 hour playback — couple of movies worth, which is decent. Left-handed users get an unfulfilled tease, as the HMP-A1 supports a screen pivot for lefty use, but doesn’t switch the directions of the controls, meaning scrolling down, for instance, will cause the HMP-A1 to scroll up.
It looks nice, but considering the major market for these units — we geeks who rip our own DVDs, record TV, and download video (illegally) — it’s probably better to wait for one of the iRiver or Archos players that don’t do annoying things like hide the directories on the hard drive.
Read [PMW.SorobanGeeks]
Related
Sony’s HMP-A1 VAIO Video Pocket [Gizmodo]
https://gizmodo.com/sonys-hmp-a1-vaio-video-pocket-9970
