The Stormblue A9 goes Bluetooth
By Peter Rojas 
posted October 20th 2005 10:45AM
posted October 20th 2005 10:45AM
Having a Bluetooth logo right on front is usually a good sign, and Stormblue's just announced the A9, a brand new portable media player with built-in Bluetooth so you can rock wireless headphones (at least that's what we're assuming, so far we can't find anything confirming that it supports A2DP or any other stereo Bluetooth profile). It's a little on the chunky side for a flash player (at least these days), but the A9 does have a 220 x 176 pixel, 260,000 color, 2.2-inch LCD, up to 2GB of memory, an SD card slot for adding more memory, and support for playback of MP3, WMA, and OGG audio files and MPEG4, DivX, and AVI video files. No word on price or availability here in the States, but it should be out in South Korea early next month.
sounds good to me
Oh yummy. If there's good software behind this, and good battery life, and if they provide some basic accessories, it could be an "iPod killer".
In my experience, and because I'm also searching for such a non-iPod product myself, every media player released has had one or more of the following problems, in the order of importance to me:
1. No armband designed to fit it. Or other accessories. I want to use the thing at the gym, ok? It's not uncommon. I think that this is a BIG complaint on non-iPod media players.
2. The navigation/software sucks. Sony players have gotten some good reviews, but the software required to manage your media from your PC is a supposed NIGHTMARE, going so far as to re-encode your existing MP3 collection with DRM restrictions, softare lock-ups, etc.
3. Not enough memory. This seems to be the one problem with this media player. For me, it's a deal breaker. Come out with at least a 4GB version, and/or a hard-drive based version with a capacity up to 40GB.
4. Miserable battery life. This is the biggest complaint with the iPods, in my experience.
http://www.stormblue.biz/eng/index.asp
http://aving.net/newproduct/default.asp?mode=read&c_code=01_01_19_01&c_num=8483&BTE_num=
looks like headphones and A2DP will be options.