Battery life of MP3 players has been greatly increased the last years, with companies such as Cowon and Sony leading the way with up to 60 hours of music playback. The record is now broken, as Panasonic intros an MP3 player with a whopping 100 hours of music playback.
The internal battery will take about 3 hours to charge, which is substantially less than one would think for such a long battery life.
The player don’t have any internal memory, and relies solely on SD(HC) cards, with 2GB bundled with the player. SDHC supports means you can use 16GB cards now and 32GB in a few months, and with 16GB cards selling for as low as $60 it’s not necessarily a bad choice. Read the rest of this entry »
Oakley’s Split Thump MP3 player sunglasses’ fashion offenses are too numerous to mention, and we’re not sure this is helping matters.
According to the folks over at Tech Digest, the wrap-around music players will be getting a very special 500-piece, 1GB Jamiroquai edition, replete with purple and white camouflage design and two new remixes from the disco-aping singer’s 1993 album Emergency on Planet Earth.
Grab your glasses, get out your floppy hat, slip on some Mickey Mouse gloves, and crack open a bottle of Vicks VapoRub — it’s time to party like you don’t know any better. Read the rest of this entry »
Nokia just busted out three Bluetooth headsets this morning: the BH-803, BH-604 (pictured), and BH-602. The most interesting of the bunch are the big, “quick to charge” BG-604 stereo cans with AVRCP remote control over your Bluetooth 2.0 equipped audio device. Expect ‘em to go global in Q3 for a bit less than €140/$187. The wee 11.3-g, BH-803 and the 11-hour talk (5-hours after a 15-minute charge) BH-602 headsets are priced for less than €160/$214 and €90/$121, respectively.
[via engadget]
The iriver NV — as in NaVigation, initially outed as the M10 — is now up and official. Chances are, if you’re in the market for a PMP, the NV’s got your needs covered. The 7-inch, 840 x 480 LED backlit LCD packs T-DMB television; SiRF III GPS; 2 SD slots (1 reserved for navigation maps presumably); a USB 2.0 host jack; FM transmitter; a “GPS Camera” which presumably GPS tags its 1.3 megapixel photos; and plenty of media support including OGG audio and DivX video among the usuals. All that in a sleek slab of kit which will more than likely never leave the S.Korean market in its current form.
[Via Akihabara News]
Archos has just announced their Generation 5, their new line of multimedia players. We will get a hands-on later today, but the 605 Wi-Fi has been posted on their site. Although it looks very similar to the previous model, it has been improved all around.
First, the 4.3-inch screen is now 800 x 480 pixels. It comes with different hard drives: 30GB, 80GB and 160GB. Archos says the top model stores up to 200 1.5-hour clips with 1,000kbit/s MPEG-4 encoding. The 605 WiFi will also stream videos from your PC and record TV shows using the optional DVR Station, DVR Travel Adapter or Mini Dock. This feature also includes a new TV Program Guide.
The most important thing, according to Archos, is that you can download movies and music using their Archos Content Portal. You are not limited to this, though: It can also surf the Web and download or watch other content as well. Strangely enough, it requires you to download a Flash plug-in to see YouTube or other Flash-based video sites.
One nice touch: it reads PDF files. You know, for <em>books</em>. <span class=”byline”>– Jesus Diaz</span>
[via gizmodo]
Looks like ginormous SSDs aren’t the only products PQI’s been cranking out of late, as the firm’s latest DAP was showing off its sparkle at Computex. The JoyTone U820 features a glossy black exterior, 1.5-inch 128 x 128 resolution LCD, ID3 tag support, MP3, WMA, and SMV playback, a photo viewer, digital voice recorder, and USB connectivity.
Unsurprisingly, there was no word as to when the U820 would find its way from the show floor onto store shelves, but as you already know, more pictorial delight awaits you after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’d been wondering when you’d ever hear anything more about Meizu’s M6 Second Edition PMP, today’s your lucky day. Looks like it’ll officially sport a seven-millimeter thick enclosure, support MPEG4, MPEG2, WMV9, H.263/264, and RM(VB) movies at 720 x 480 resolution (30fps, too), and include TV out for piping multimedia to your tube.
Additionally, the viewing angles have been improved and the screen size was bumped up a mere 0.01-inches (huzzah?), and we’re told that it can purportedly last 30 solid hours playing back music or between 3 to 5 hours when watching videos. The bad news, however, is that the August ship date has slipped to Q4, and we’re warned that even that may end up falling through. Way to test our patience, Meizu.
[Via MeizuMe]
Not too long after Belkin threw its name in the iPhone accessory hat, the company has now introduced a number of replacement iPod docks and charging kits. The $49.99 F8Z126 Power Dock AV is essentially a basic silver iPod dock that sports USB connectivity and AV output in order to pipe multimedia to your television set, while the vanilla $34.99 F8Z122 Power Dock strips itself of any video exporting abilities.
On the charging side, the $34.99 F8Z152 Charging Kit for iPod consists of an AC outlet to dock connector cable, USB cable, and a cigarette adapter for road trippin’, while the $24.99 F8Z121 Power Adapter for iPod offers up just the AC adapter for those strange moments when you can’t seem to locate a spare USB port. All four units should be available any moment here in the US, while launches in Asia, Europe, and Australia will be following soon.
[via engadget]
Just got official word from SanDisk that they’re putting the Sansa View on ice, at least for the time being. A rep we spoke with told us that SanDisk has, “decided to re-scope the product, so we’ll not be bringing it to market this year.” Apparently they’re still committed to the portable media player market, but that, “the market is changing fast and furious and we want to shift our efforts to develop a PMP that will meet the needs of the market versus pushing out the wrong product. So we’re taking another look.”
It’s disappointing that we won’t be seeing their take on a widescreen flash-based portable video player, but we’ll give ‘em points for at least being upfront about the sitch — and for realizing that it’s better not to release a product at all than to release one that offers a sub-standard experience. Usually when an electronics company kills a product before launch like this they just try and pretend like it never existed in the first place and hope that nobody notices that it never came out.
[via engadget]
Korea sure loves ‘em some convergence, and few homegrowns can top Cowon when it comes to packing audio, video, SatNav, and mobile TV into a single sleek device. No suprise then to find Cowon’s L2 packing enough acronyms to choke a middle-manager: FM radio, DMB TV, 7-inch TFT LCD with PIP, SiRF Star III GPS, and support for JPG, BMP, PNG, MP3, WAV, ASF, WMA, MPEG-4 media stored in the 2GB of built-in storage or SD card expansion.
Unfortunately, it’s only capable of a weak sauce 432 × 240 pixel resolution scattered across that big 7-inch display. Hey, what were you expecting, 1080p — oh, right. Fully configured for 299,000 or about $322 when these hit K-town on June 5th.
[Via Akihabara News]
