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Cowon iAUDIO 9+ 2-inch PMP launching July 12th in Japan for $118 and up
Remember the days before portable media players sported touchscreens? You'll soon be able to relive that golden era with Cowon's iAUDIO 9+, a diminutive PMP that's launching July 12th in Japan. The device features a 2-inch QVGA (320 x 240-pixel) display mounted above a capacitive touchpad and comes in three capacities (and two colors) -- 8GB (white) for 11,800 Yen ($118), 16GB (black) for 13,800 Yen ($138) and 32GB (black) for 16,800 Yen ($168). It boasts a 30mW headphone amp, video connectivity (with an optional cable) and even a microphone and FM radio (to record voice and broadcasts). The unit measures 95 x 43 x 8.9mm (3.74 x 1.69 x 0.35 inches), and weighs just 40g (1.41oz). Battery life is rated at 29 hours for audio playback and seven hours for video content. Rounding things up are 48 (!) EQ presets and support for a plethora of formats (including such rarities as FLAC and OGG) along with USB mass storage.
iRiver B100 wants you to 'touch the supreme sound', pedants grumble
It's been some time since we heard much from iRiver but the PMP maker is keeping busy with the snow-white B100. This capacitive touchscreen media player will offer up to 36 hours of music playback, or eight and a half hours of video watching. The 3.1-inch TFT screen has a resolution of 320 x 480, but it's backed up by a (relatively) long list of media codecs, including OGG, WAV, APE and ASF compatibility. If you're sick of limited playback options, you might want to consider downscaling those screen-size desires for improved format freedom. The PMP launches today, with prices starting at 11,800 yen (around $144) for the 4GB model, while the 8GB version will set you back 13,800 yen (around $168) at online Japanese retailer, Rakuten. The Google-translated PR awaits your quizzical looks below.
PowerDVD 12 brings syncing and transcoding for mobile devices
It's been less than a year since CyberLink revealed PowerDVD 11 and now along comes PowerDVD 12. Among the new features in 12 is the ability to sync media -- we can only assume this excludes protected content -- to PowerDVD Mobile for Android as well as automatically transcode videos for most of the popular mobile devices. Said mobile clients are only free, though, if you opt of the $99 Ultra version of PowerDVD. PowerDVD Mobile is available for everyone else for $19.99, as well as PowerDVD Remote for $4.99. Overall it seems like an iterative update that might not hit the spot at $45 (for an upgrade), but there are other new features like OGG and FLAC support that might just push you over the edge.
Grace Digital Allegro review
Dedicated internet radios have always been niche products; when you can get all the same content on your desktop, laptop or even smartphone, it's hard to see the point of relying on WiFi. Without a traditional FM antenna, they're many are chained to your network -- if not your wall -- and the lack of keyboard input for setup and channel search furthers their plight. Even so, there must be something to it, as this gadget category refuses to die, so we thought we'd give one promising newcomer a good, thorough try. The Grace Digital Allegro caught our attention with a packed feature list (including Pandora) and a clean, mobile design. Did it enthrall or disappoint? Find out after the break.%Gallery-92306%
Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you
Know Your Rights is Engadget's technology law series, written by our own totally punk ex-copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. This isn't legal advice or analysis, so don't get all donked in the head. What on earth is going on with H.264, patents, and video encoding on the web? It seems like ever since Steve Jobs published his Thoughts on Flash the world has gone crazy. We know what you mean! It's getting pretty silly out there. OSNews just declared that H.264 would be the death of video art and culture because professional video cameras are only licensed by AT&T for personal and non-commercial usage. Terrifying, although most of the creative people we know have continued working free of devastating laser attacks from space.
Ask TUAW: File ownership and permissions, converting FLV and OGG, extra displays, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about changing file ownership and permissions, adding two external displays to a MacBook Pro, converting OGG and FLV files on an older Mac, transferring a Time Machine backup to a new disk, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
iriver Story reviewed, incites rebellion over price
If you didn't feel you got the whole Story yesterday, here's a pleasing helping of seconds, this time in the form of a full-on review. The PC Pro team rates iriver's Kindle emulator as a "serious contender," and places its readability on par with Sony's touch-less Readers. While congratulations are also meted out for a decent integrated MP3 player, 3.5mm headphone jack, and the wide variety of supported formats, two issues stood out for the reviewers. One was that the support for Word, Excel and Powerpoint files was somewhat hit-and-miss, with zooming sometimes not working and rendering some files unreadable. But the major gripe related to the asking price of £230 including taxes (around $380), which the Story was not considered capable of justifying. Hit the link below for more -- even if your interest is purely academic.
ASUS ships $100 O!Play HDP-R1 HD media streamer
Hey, you -- yeah, you. Remember that O!Play HDP-R1 media player that ASUS teased us with back in June? Remember how you dedicated a calender to it so you could count down the days 'til its arrival? Time to stop all that madness, as said box is finally on sale and shipping right now within the US of A. For the surprisingly reasonable price of $99.99, users can utilize this very device to stream and play back an array of formats with 1080p resolution support. Heck, there's even an eSATA and Ethernet port there, just waiting for your love. So, will you show it? Or is life still worth living knowing what you've neglected?[Via Slashgear]
Linden Lab's Tom Hale announces Second Life support for media plug-ins
As a part of his keynote presentation today at this year's Second Life Community Convention, Linden Lab's Tom Hale has unveiled a new plug-in framework for the Second Life viewer. The Second Life viewer has hitherto been restricted to rendering media content that was supported either by its browser component or by the use of Apple's Quicktime. Quicktime is certainly quite workable, but only provides a subset of the extensive range of potentially viewable media that's out there. The introduction of the LLMedia API looks to change all that, by allowing a straightforward plug-in system to extend the viewer's ability to render various arbitrary kinds of parcel media.
Firefox 3.5 arrives
After some rather impressive RC builds, Firefox 3.5 is all packaged up and ready for public consumption. Mozilla is saying its new browser is more than two times faster than Firefox 3, but what has us more excited is the support for plugin-free "open codec" video and audio playback using Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora-- it's still in its infancy, but the subtle glimpse we've seen so far of a world without Flash video reducing our CPU to jelly is rather compelling.
ASUS O!Play HDP-R1 media player won't likely get an O-face
We knew it was coming, now the ASUS O!Play is official. The HDP-R1 HD Media Player supports HD video playback in a variety of codecs including MPEG1/2/4, H.264, VC-1, and RM/RMVB in a multitude of packages including .mp4, .mov, .avi, .divx, and .mkv just to name a few. FLAC and OGG audio? Yup, no problem. The box connects to your display over HDMI or composite A/V with an option for optical digital audio for multi-channel setups. Media can be slung off a single USB 2.0/eSATA combo port, second vanilla USB 2.0 jack, or streamed over fixed Ethernet if you prefer to keep your content on the other side of the house. Sorry, no 802.11n because, you know, everyone's home is wired with Cat 5 (riiiight). No price or release date given; but it would have to be cheap and soon for us to be even remotely interested.
Sansa Fuze updated to support Ogg and FLAC
SanDisk just released a firmware update for the Sansa Fuze -- pretty minor, except it adds in support for FLAC and Ogg, which should make fans of jam bands and lossless music encoding extremely happy. Nothing much else of note here apart from some UI tweaks and bug fixes, but Fuze owners will be appreciative, we're sure.[Via DAPreview]
iriver's Spinn hits the FCC, means nothing
Sure, it doesn't look like much thanks to the FCC's staunch aversion to photo glam, but that's iriver's Spinn PMP, a product which had us at a full, rigid swoon back at CES. While this would generally be good news, the model approved features a DAB radio and DMB television tuner -- in other words, it's not intended for US consumption. The user manual also confirms a FM radio, Mini SD slot, Bluetooth, D-Click System interface, 27 hours of audio and 5 hours of video, and support for SWF (Flash), TXT, MP3, WMA, OGG, JPG, AVI, MWV file formats. With FCC approval out of the way, the rumored UK August release date is presumably in the bag.
Samsung's YP-S2 pebble skips out in Korea
They are here. Samsung's satisfyingly bulbous S2 "pebble" MP3 player was just released in S.Korea. DNSe audio processing, five colors, and MP3, WMA, and OGG support now yours in 1GB ???49,000 (about $54) or 2GB for ???59,000 (about $65) models. Neato.
Cowon's all singing all dancing A3: November 14th
Rumored forever before its CES debut in January, Cowon is finally releasing their A3 personal media player. So tell us oh gentle reader, was the DaVinci chipset; 4-inch, 16M color, 480x272 800 x 480 (!!) pixel display; USB host; FM radio and recorder; MPEG-4 video recorder; 1280 x 720 HD output; and vast codec support including DivX, FLAC, OGG, and wide variety of lossless audio worth the wait? Available November 14th in 30GB and 60GB flavors for ???349,000 (about $387) and ???419,000 (about $465), respectively. %Gallery-9884%[Via AVING]
Sharp's SP700 PMP for edumacated students
In October 2006, Sharp's 4.3-inch SP700 full-screen, touch-sensitive media player was considered quite the looker. Funny how brickley this chunker can appear just one year later at its time of release. Still, those students looking for a decent list of supported codecs -- DivX, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV7/8/9, H.264, OGG, MP3, WAV, and WMA to name a few -- along with a T-DMB television receiver and full suite of electronic dictionaries should still feel a slight tickle to their scholarly fancy. The Windows CE 5.0 device rides atop a 30GB disk and offers SD/MMC expansion and USB Host capabilities for quick, PC-less transfer of data directly to the device. Ready for the price? Yours for ???478,000 sweetheart or about $521 if you're real nice to daddy.[Via AVING]
iriver W10 WiFi media player with Skyhook positioning ready in November?
Man, we've been painstakingly following iriver's development of the W10 media player since it was first rumored back in July of 2006. Well before touchscreen DAPs were all the rage. One hands-on and several postings later, iRiver seems prepped to push their baby out in November to what will assuredly be an adoring public, in S.Korea anyway. What's the fuss? 3-inch, 480 x 272 TFT touchscreen interface; WiFi with Skyhook's GPS-like positioning and NAVTEQ maps; VoIP; FM tuner; AOL XM radio streaming; 2/4/8GB capacities with miniSD expansion; and support for MP3, WMA, OGG audio and MPEG-4, WMV9 video all riding atop an iriver tuned WinCE 5.0 OS. Thing is, those NAVTEQ maps and POIs are "only suitable for US" -- a hopeful sign that we'll see these Stateside in time for the holidays.[Thanks, Al]
TurboLinux's Wizpy bootable Linux PMP reviewed
We witnessed the birth of TurboLinux's Wizpy, watched it strike out in earnest and eventually earn a living on the mean, PMP streets. So how has the wee, bootable Linux distro cum PMP fared? Well, according to a review over at LinuxLookup, it's a nice piece of kit and all although a bit finicky. 1GB of the 4GB is reserved for the OS and fully functional desktop (Firefox, OpenOffice, Skype, etc.) with the remaining 2.8GB allocated to OGG/WMA/AAC/MP3 audio and DivX video. However, as the reviewer points out (and we agree) the $290 price tag will limit its appeal to early adopters and Linux fanboys. Actually, strike the latter, any fanboy worth his salt will build his own bootable DAP (without the tiny 1.7-inch screen) for less than $40. Poor poor Wizpy, why'd you have to become such a snob?
Cowon's iAudio 7 packs 8GB of FLAC on flash
What's better than the beloved iAudio 6? Why, the iAudio 7 of course... it's 1 better. Meet Cowon's latest DAP with that "simply brilliant" 1.3-inch LCD. Only now, we're looking at 8GB of flash memory instead of that dawdling 0.85-inch disk drive of its predecessor. The iAudio 7 is one of just a few to support FLAC and OGG audio in addition to the usual suspects and XviD video. Hell, it even squeezes up to 60 hours from a Lithium Polymer battery which can be charged via USB. Priced at just ???169,000 (about $182) for the 4GB on up to ???229,000 (about $246) for the full 8GB, what's not to love? %Gallery-3952%[Via AVING]
Firefly: Streaming to iTunes with DAAP
Make blog recently posted about how to run an iTunes DAAP server in Linux with Firefly. Firefly (né mt-daapd) provides an open-source digital audio server that supports iTunes-compatible streaming. With it, you can stream your media from a Linux platform to any other computer that's running iTunes. Best of all, it transcodes in real time. This allows you to stream file formats not normally supported by iTunes, such as OGG and FLAC. Full disclosure: I occasionally write for Make.
