Sony: VAIO Video Pocket to arrive soon
Sony makes the first move and has decided to create a video iPod killer before Apple can get the jump on them. The VAIO Pocket Video is planned to be launched in the "very near future" — i.e. "earlier than 2005" — according to the chief of the VAIO division, Keiji Kimura. The portable player will include a hard drive, MPEG-4/MPEG-2 video decoding, and (here's the good part), 802.11g-based Wi-Fi for wirelessly streaming video to a TV.
It's obvious they're trying come up with a competitor to those new personal video players running on Microsoft's Portable Media Center software, the first of which are due out later this year and are expected to cost around $400. We saw a product manager from Microsoft's TV division deliver a speech earlier this week where he confirmed that you'll be able to buy movies for the PMC from video download services CinemaNow and MovieLink.
