Tatung's V620 Portable Media Center
By Peter Rojas 
posted June 3rd 2005 12:01PM
posted June 3rd 2005 12:01PM
Anyone else noticed how Portable Media Centers have more or less dropped out of sight? There were a handful from Creative, iRiver, and Samsung last year, but otherwise Microsoft's OS for portable video players hasn't gotten much love from manufacturers. Not sure if that's going to change anytime soon, but BargainPDA spotted a new PMC at Computex this week. The V620, which has a 3.5-inch LCD screen, a 20GB hard drive, and support for playback of WMV, DivX, and MPEG4 video files, is a bit smaller than some other Portable Media Centers out there, should be available worldwide by October.
yeah, but does it cook rice?
Finally.... Divx support :-)
Too bad it looks butt ugly though
The MediaREADY Flyboy is a much better deal. You get 40gb and all the other features, for half the cost ($350)! Can't be beat.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009RF6Q2/qid=1117816730/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/103-6933801-1781461?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846
The problem with this class of device is that it's skewed all over the place - and so kind of steps out of bounds a lot.
Pricewise - they're very expensive - $600 to $750 for 20GB storage. They have limited functionality and moving media to them tends to be clumsy. They're large - too large to put in a pocket - and relatively heavy. Most don't have removable batteries, so when you run out of juice - they're just another heavy brick.
Meanwhile, PDAs are creeping up resolution and screen size and some are even getting hard drives - or if they have CFII slots, you can add microdrives and carry spare batteries. Plus, since they're PDAs you can actually do other things with them when not listening to music or watching a flick.
High end PDAs are around the same price as media centres, but are useful for so much more - while being able to do everything a media centre can.
There's a crossover product line which is just starting to surface: the tablet PDA. It's bigger than a regular PDA - but smaller than a laptop - about the size of a PSP but more squarish - and will have a large enough screen to provide good multimedia playback, while still being a powerful PDA/Portable computer/Web device.
I'm afraid that portable media centres as dedicated devices were too little, too late and for too much.
I have the Creative PMC and I love it. I don't want to watch videos on my PDA and I don't want to always carry around a laptop.
I love that this device has DivX support, that's awesome!