So Long, MP3; Hello, PVP
By Bill Howard
June 25, 2003
The MP3 player market is thoroughly fleshed out, even if many of the players are still somewhat clunky: Try to name all the insanely great players besides the iPod. It's time to declare victory for the iPod and move on to the next big thing in personal entertainment. That may well be the personal video player (PVP), which adds a color LCD to the hard drive MP3 player concept for video as well as audio playback. If you're in the market for a hard drive–based personal audio player, consider an audio/video player.
Several personal video players are reaching the market this year—nearly a dozen, if you broaden the definition to include Palm OS PDAs and Pocket PCs with color screens. The two most intriguing mainstream personal video players I've seen so far are the Archos Video AV 320 and the Thomson RD2780 RCA Lyra Audio/Video Jukebox. There's also the SmartDisk FlashTrax, which has fewer recording options than the others. And by year's end, you may see PVPs based on an Intel reference design using Microsoft Windows CE.
A typical PVP costs around $500 and has a 3- to 4-inch color display capable of 320-by-240 resolution, a 20GB to 40GB hard drive, the ability to record audio (MP3 and maybe WMA) and video (MPEG-4), and 4 hours of battery life. It also has a USB 2.0 interface and, when connected, appears to your PC or notebook as a hard drive, meaning you'll have an outside chance of bluffing your boss that this is the road-warrior backup hard drive you really need. (An on-the-ball boss will stamp the request "rejected" and point you instead in the direction of a 120GB Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE USB 2.0 drive at half the price.)
A PVP may also have a CompactFlash slot (with adapters for Secure Digital and Memory Stick formats) to lure photographers on location or vacation who need to off-load photos from their memory cards. A PVP is a bit big to take jogging, but not impossible; it weighs just under a pound and fits in an overcoat pocket. You wouldn't want to clip it to a belt unless the belt normally can support a personal sidearm and a canteen.
How would you use it? Imagine watching your own videos for an entire Los Angeles–to–London flight, or keeping the backseat rats occupied on the Pittsburgh-to-Charleston vacation drive. The $500 price compares very favorably with that of a backseat DVD entertainment system, even if you were to add an outboard LCD screen for a second passenger.
With 20GB of storage space, you could load 10 movies, 20 "American Idol" episodes, 350 music CDs, or every still digital picture you have ever taken. Besides doing USB transfers of multimedia files from your PC, you can record video by connecting your television, DVD player, or VCR line-out jack to the PVP's line-in jack and record to MPEG-4—in real time, unfortunately. The copy protection on a DVD could possibly interfere with even an analog video signal, though in initial tests with the Archos unit, DVD videos recorded properly. And then there's the issue of fixed internal 4-hour batteries on 10-hour flights.
You'll see some differences among PVPs. The Archos model has an optional clip-on video camera module, and its encoders are available as external add-ons. The Thomson unit integrates the encoder and a CF slot. The SmartDisk product uses a PC for encoding.
You could consider the 4-ounce Panasonic SV-AV30 a PVP (it's also a still/video camera), with SD cards now at 1GB and expanding to 4GB next year. The same goes for PDAs with big memory cards.
Pure audio players are moving ahead as well. But I'm surprised that no company has yet challenged the iPod with a hard drive audio player that is small and stylish and undercuts Apple's price by 25 percent. Competitors are wedded to bricklike 2.5-inch drives and painfully inadequate interfaces. Duplicating the iPod isn't rocket science—no more than realizing that people want 99-cent, no-strings- attached downloads of online music, but only Apple offers those (available only through iTunes, at the iTunes Music Store, www.apple.com/music).,
It remains to be seen which product will become the iPod of personal video players. The first steps look promising to me.
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