Aigo's F989 / MP-E817 PMPs are eying your kids

Let's face it, portable media players are no long reserved for the adults out there, as even Aigo has caved to the kiddos' pressures and produced its own duo of youngster-centric PMPs. Following in the footsteps of Disney and Toy Quest (among others), the F989 rocks a kid-friendly design, handheld gaming system motif, a 2.4-inch QVGA screen, SD card slot, 1.3-megapixel camera, FM radio, microphone, an e-book reader, photo browser, built-in clock / calendar / stopwatch, calculator, and ten pre-loaded games to boot. Of course, it will also play back SFW / AVI files at 30fps, which should be just fine for those converted Spongebob episodes. The MP-E917 (pictured after the break) boasts a slightly sleeker interface, shares the same color monitor and video playback functionality, comes in 1GB / 2GB editions, and includes a miniSD slot for future expansion. No word just yet on pricing or availability, but we're sure your highly intelligent offspring will let you know the minute they find out.

[Via PMPToday]

[Josh @ Mar 31st 2007 1:13PM]

And those are exactly the classic iPod earphones...

[PenaltyKillah @ Mar 31st 2007 10:26PM]

"... And those are exactly the classic iPod earphones... ..."
Yeah, what's with the Chinese? (I'm not being prejudicial, I'm Chinese myself) They are the king of pirated software/hardware, with aigo, Meizu, and MediaBox (or is it Mediaman?) making copies of iPods, irivers, and such. Oh well, even if they have no chance to topple the iPod monopoly, they can still topple the kids' DAP/PMP monopoly with that player. Watch out Disney!

[JRetSapDoog @ Apr 1st 2007 6:19AM]

After an admittedly brief search for a "sfw" file/video format, I'm guessing that the Adobe (formerly Macromedia) swf file format is intended, standing for "small web format" or "Shockwave Flash" depending on the day of week. That's what the read link provided shows after being transgibberdized through Google's better-than-nothing service as "Mosaic positive 2.4-inch screen and can SWF format AVI video broadcast shows the rate can reach 30 frames / sec," which I'm guessing is closer to the source than the english pages cited (though, so far, I haven't been successful verifying that from the horse's mouth at www.aigo.com.cn).

If, indeed, it is Flash, per the usual, no word on what version of Flash it is (Flash 4/5/6/7/8/9, Flash Lite 1.1/2.0+, etc.), whether or not it processes ActionScript for programmatic control, or whether or not it is a licensed version or a home-grown (or third-source) version. For what it's worth, the site www.beareyes.com.cn reports, "2.4 inch color display, support for MP4 (avi), swf format Video Player." However, that doesn't definitively address whether it can run programs (like games other than the usual non-Flash, 16-bit games) or not. Recently, the Ramos V100 had claimed swf ability, but it turns out (according to one programmer) that it only supported timeline playback. Meanwhile, the Ramos V300 (with a seemingly unusual screen resolution) is explicitly claiming Flash Lite 1.1/2.0 ability, but who knows. As always, it's not easy to find full information about Flash compatibility. Perhaps a Chinese-literate person can delve deeper....