Kenwood Media Keg reviewed

While the phrase "world's smallest disk-based digital audio player" will likely be enough to convince some to thrown down the Yen for Kenwood's latest Media Keg, the good folks at Impress' AV Watch nevertheless decided to check out the player for themselves to see how the rest of its features stack up. You'll have to take this with the usual machine translation caveats, of course, but from what we can tell, they seem to give the player a decent recommendation, though not without finding a few faults. While they were obviously impressed with the player's size, as well as its sound quality, they found the player's 1-inch hard drive to be noticeably slower than the larger 1.8-inch models used in other players, putting a drag on both transfer speeds and overall operating speed. Also working against it is the price -- a full 40,000 Yen ($340) -- which definitely means you're paying quite a premium for the player's small size. But what else is new?

[R @ Dec 15th 2006 12:24PM]

Why would anyone pay that for 10 GB? Just get a flash-based player . . . cheaper, no moving parts to "crash" on you, etc. Sansa is up to 8GB for $100 less.

[Rick Lyon @ Dec 15th 2006 12:29PM]

$340? Ah no. Seems everyone wants to get in the iPod market.

[Jason @ Dec 15th 2006 12:44PM]

Only $100 more for 22 gigs less!

[Christopher @ Dec 15th 2006 1:33PM]

The Japs love small though, small I guess is beautiful to some, so this'll sell well in Japan and probably nowhere else. Same as usual I suppose. Probably won't even be properly marketed outside of JP! Just like all the kazillion new mobile phones they get every year while we have forty-odd crap handsets

[Lee Herron @ Dec 15th 2006 2:07PM]

I wonder if it works with their car audio headunits

[embee @ Dec 15th 2006 7:06PM]

You bastards. I see Media Keg and I think a keg o' fermented beverage with the ability to play MP3, OGG, and DivX.

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