Voice-nav MP3 Players & HD-based Video

[Tinroad]

Is it a phone? Is it an audio player? It's...
10:11 Monday 10th March 2003
John Lui, CNET Asia

BenQ's latest device is a mobile phone that doubles as a digital audio-video player, using Microsoft's Media2Go operating system

A Taiwanese electronics maker plans this year to begin selling a portable device that's half digital audio-video player and half mobile phone.

"Movie playback is one of our major targets with this device," said Rick Lei, general manager of sales at BenQ, which spun off from computer giant Acer a year ago to concentrate on high-tech consumer products.

The device will sport Microsoft's as-yet-unreleased Media2Go operating system. The OS is designed for multimedia on mobile devices, said Lei, and is a good fit for BenQ's upcoming product.

He added that the company's engineers in Taiwan are working with Microsoft to ensure that the device can play stored music, photos and movies, compressed in formats such as MPEG-4.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as Kazaa have been explosively popular in the past year, with millions of users downloading MP3 music, movies or TV shows into PCs. Each movie typically consumes around one gigabyte of hard drive space.

The as-yet-unnamed BenQ multimedia player/phone will sport a 10GB or 20GB hard disk of the 1.8-inch variety made by Toshiba or Hitachi -- the same type found in Apple Computer's iPod.

When launched in August or September, the device will cost $399 (about £250) for the 10GB version and $499 for the 20GB version.

Since BenQ spun off from Acer, it has had to compete with rivals such as Sony and Samsung, which like BenQ sell both IT and consumer products, with some of them blurring the line between the two worlds.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t287-s2131633,00.html

Meanwhile, hi-rez wireless video still seems a ways off...

Benq shows off digital hub
Thursday, 13 March 2003

You can't stream video over a Wi-Fi 802.11b wireless network, right? The technology's 11Mbps bandwidth isn't sufficient.

Wrong... At this year's CeBit computer show in Germany, Taiwanese technology giant Benq was doing just that: a prototype 'digital hub' that includes a TV tuner was beaming a TV signal to a notebook over an 802.11b wireless connection.

Picture quality is compromised — it's more like Mpeg-4 than DVD definition — and the distance has to be kept under five metres to keep the signal at the full 11Mbps, but it's still impressive.

The concept is very much experimental; Benq UK staff at CeBit had heard the digital hub talked about, but hadn't expected to see it at the show. "It will be at least three to six months before a finished product reaches the market," said Royce Lye, Benq UK marketing manager.

By that time, an new wireless LAN standard, 802.11g with a much higher bandwidth of 54Mbps — easily enough for high-quality video transmission — should have been ratified and the fast 802.11a standard (also offering 54Mbps) will be more widely available.

The hub is essentially a stripped-down version of the company's Joybook — a notebook-format 'media integration' device that looks like a run-of-the-mill laptop with a high-quality screen and a fancy trim, but which contains a suite of media integration software for audio and video creation and editing rather than office productivity tools.

The hub has no screen, keyboard, mouse or speakers, just a couple of ports, an aerial and a few LEDs. But it is likely to be the forerunner of a long line of products, emanating from Asian and Far Eastern countries, that seek to bring digital integration to the home, linking TV, audio, movie-making and web-based 'infotainment'.

"As a piece of hardware the hub is quite a dull product," said Lye, "but it's the potential for what it can integrate that's interesting."

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/index.cfm?go=news.view&news=3150