e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[Tenderloin]

Some new Asian DAP-stuff from... ehr.. TGE... or something

Well, this one came out of the blue like a meteor splitting the earth in two, but anyway: Chinese TGE has some new DAP's in their pipeline.

First off, there's the 1.8" HDD player called... drumm roll... "Jukebox". Well, one tip: this name won't make you famous. Other than that, the player's looking pretty cool. It offers line-in encoding, FM-tuner and the likes, plus 12 hours of playback time per charge, USB2.0 transfers and USB-host functionality. No indication on prices - this one will come with 20GB, MP3 & WMA support, that's pretty much it.

The other two players are video-DAP's, which support MPEG4 & DivX @ 640 x 480 (25fps). Both seem to last for 4 hours whilst playing video, whereas music can be played for some 10 hours in a row before having to recharge the li-ion batteries (plural?).

There's a large one, measuring 107*72*25 (mm), boasting 20GB of capacity and 3.5" TFT. Next to that, there's a micro-HDD version of it (we've seen this before, one news post below: S-Media's Black Diamond set the tone) with a 2.5" TFT. Dimensions unknown, same goes for any other information such as price and release dates (sometime in 2004, yay). Seem to come with some kind of docking station, though.

Don't make the assumption that these products won't make it to Europe/USA. One of them did already, we talked about it earlier this year: the mini Jukebox, OEM'ed by Typhoon (arghr... GoDot-flashbacks). TGE has rebranded the iOPS MFP-3xx series, Aigo's little colour TFT-flash player and several other slightly-known products as well. These players are likely to be sold under any name but TGE's, but they might show up eventually.

http://www.austinv.com/comment.php?comment.news.173