e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[Tenderloin]

New breed of portable media players means squinting at palm-sized video
Thu, Sep. 16, 2004
By Ron Harris

Associated Press


SAN FRANCISCO - It was a Holy Grail looming on the personal electronics horizon: a pocket-sized device with a workhorse battery and the capacity to hold hours of audio and video.

After all, because people already stuff multimedia files on their cell phones and personal digital assistants, or PDAs, why not give them one dedicated device to swiftly handle all their entertainment-on-the-go needs?

The answer will disappoint: The new breed of portable media players is finally here, but the devices are too small to comfortably watch movies on and too bulky to compete with my MP3 music player.

The $499 Creative Zen I tested, from Creative Labs Inc., is about twice as thick as a PDA, as well as longer and heavier, so it's not something you'd toss in your purse or pocket. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and iRiver Inc. make competing models (the companies would not provide test units).

They all use Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Portable operating system, which is really just Windows CE, the operating system commonly used in PDAs, minus some personal information management tools. Microsoft is hoping people will want to pop these devices open while they cycle at the gym or squeeze into a coach seat on a cross-country flight.

Zen sports 20 gigabytes of memory and plays loads of multimedia file types, including ``.wmv,' ``.asf,' ``.mpg,' ``.jpg' and ``.mp3.' It gets content from the desktop PC, via Microsoft's new Windows Media Player 10 application.

Multimedia content dragged into the library of the Media Player software was synched to my Zen when I connected via USB 2.0 cable. This electronic kiss between desktop and device is important and worked seamlessly.

The Zen's navigation screen is intuitive enough. There are four directional buttons on the upper left with a round ``OK' button in the middle to toggle me through the colorful menus. A nifty green button in the far corner flying Microsoft's four-colored flag takes you back to the equivalent of a home page listing ``My TV,' ``My Music,' ``My Pictures,' ``My Video' and ``Settings.'

When I clicked on ``My Pictures,' the folder I designated for synchronization appeared, as did my wedding photos inside. I'm can view photos one by one or play them as a slideshow.

But to have to first sync the machine with your desktop seems redundant. It's not as if I can plug my compact flash card into the Zen and see photos I've just taken, so I'm hardly sold on the value of the traveling photo album on Zen's 3.8-inch LCD screen.

For audio, the Zen is great for storage, and Creative promises 22 hours of straight battery life for audio playback. It delivered hours for me without losing one of the three battery level indicator notches on screen.

The Zen's onboard speaker is useless, though, under most circumstances. The volume range runs from 0 to 20, and you have to crank it to about 18 to hear anything. But at higher volume settings, the audio tends to distort. The sound through the headphones was fine.

Creative's rechargeable battery pack also promises seven hours of video playback.

Microsoft has partnered with a few content providers, and I used one of them, CinemaNow, to buy a documentary on Area 51 and a spooky thriller called ``Anima,' for $2.99 each. Most of the CinemaNow titles are B-movie fodder.

``Anima' weighed in at 318 megabytes and took about 20 minutes to download. The movie was encoded at 514 kilobits per second, meaning when you look at it on a SMALL screen like the one on the Zen, it's as clear and crisp as a bell. Any larger and it would pixelate badly, and it did when I connected the Zen to a television using the supplied cables. But if I've got a TV nearby, why use the Zen at all -- right?

Watching videos is fine when there's a close-up of an object or a person on the screen, but background details get really tiny. You also have to look at the unit head on, and any viewing from a slight angle is nearly impossible because of the unit's screen glare.

Another oddity came into play here. My download of ``Anima' continued to play on the Zen nearly a week after the 48-hour viewing window had expired. Creative's portable product brand manager, Linda O'Malley, said a realtime clock on the Zen should have prevented that. The copy on my desktop did indeed time out.

With Zen's $499 price tag, it's not exactly a steal. The gadget masters over at TigerDirect.com will sell me a 20-gig laptop with a DVD-ROM drive for only $100 more, and a portable DVD player with a 5-inch screen can be had for less than $200 at Target.

Using the Zen only made me want an iPod Mini and a new laptop instead. Convergence, at least for now, will have to take a backseat to usability.

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On the Net:

http://www.creative.com/PortableMediaCenters