Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those of you following my blog for a while probably know that I write a lot about two gadgets in particular that I own – the Treo 650 phone (which I just upgraded to a Treo 700P) and the iPod (which I currently own the 5^th generation 60GB model capable of playing video). While I love both devices, my ultimate goal as a gadget freak is to only have one to carry around. You know, the whole “convergence” thing taken to it’s essence.

Some recent studies have suggested that most people want a phone that’s just a phone and doesn’t do a zillion other things. This may or may not be true, but if it is, I think it’s partly due to the current set of phones that “pretend” to be all-in-one devices. These phones are not the “smartphones” that comprise the Treo, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones, but rather are tiny stylish devices like the Motorola Razr which have cameras, calendars, and now often MP3 players built in.. The small screens and limited space for buttons and controls, not to mention a tiny batteries that have to cope with more demand for power, means that these devices end up being mainly good for novelty uses compared to dedicated MP3 players like the iPod or full-fledged digital cameras – even the sleekest compact of these.

For those of us who are too old or geeky to care about looking fashionable and don’t need the smallest phone on the block, the Palm (and previously Handspring) Treo have long been a great phone that combines a huge array of other uses due to its sporting the PalmOS operating system, the one used on Palm personal digital assistants for more than 10 years. Thousands of programs, many free and many others inexpensive shareware, have been written for this platform to the point where you could almost compare Treos to tiny PC’s.

For example I used my Treo 650 as a GPS (along with a tiny GPS receiver that hid in my glove compartment and which the Treo would connect to wirelessly) in order to get constant indications of where I was on the road, turn-by-turn directions to a destination, and even dynamic rerouting if I missed a turn – all communicated via both the Treo’s screen as well as a large choice of audio voices. I had all my contact information, schedules, to-do lists, and notes that I could sync with my MS Outlook and hosted exchange account. I had a version of Quicken (“Pocket Quicken” as it’s called), so I could record transactions on the road and sync with my main Quicken program when I got home. I had a program that allowed me to view my desktop of my PC at home and control any aspect of my computer no matter where I was. I got my email, of course, and was able to communicate via instant messages, text messaging, etc. I could also view full web pages and access most websites with no problem. Oh yes, and there was a phone too!

While the Treos had several MP3 players, none really gave the same degree of elegance as the combination of iTunes and the iPod. Many had features that the iPod didn’t, though. Pocket Tunes is the best known of these programs and has probably the largest array of capabilities - in addition to playing MP3’s, it can play Ogg Vorbis format files (an open-source format that has better quality and smaller files than MP3), and Windows Media Audio file format (a proprietary format that MS developed). Within the last year it also started supporting DMA-protected WMA files from music subscription sites like Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and Napster To Go. This allows you to subscribe to a service for a $10-15/month fee and download an unlimited number of songs to your computer and subsequently to your portable device. Pocket Tunes in its Deluxe version also has had the ability to stream a type of internet radio called Shoutcast (MP3 streams), so you could listen to live radio, although until very recently not at a very good quality level due to the network speeds at which cell phones have been able to communicate. If you are an audio book fan and have an account with the largest digital audio book company out there, Audible.com, Treos, as well as all PalmOS and PocketPC-based phones and PDA’s have long been able to sync Audible format files from your computer and play them. More recently those who have a phone with a cellular data plan or a PDA with a Wifi connection could also download programs from their Audible library on the fly via a program called Audible Air.

Most of the MP3 players for the Treo have traditionally done their syncing, at least on Windows PC’s, through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player which is free and built in to the Windows Operating System. Alternately you can simply copy files directly onto an external memory card on your Treo and then let the program search for these files and add them to its library. While this works, it’s far from ideal now that cards with very large capacities are being sold inexpensively and for those of us who have tens of gigabytes of audio files, be they music, audio books, or podcasts. Some people fare well with Windows Media player, but in my brief time trying to use it to sync with my Treo, I had numerous problems, ranging from it recopying files that were already on my device each time I synced, to not copying files that should have been copied, etc. It simply wasn’t reliable.

While there were certainly limitations before that made the earlier Treos not the ideal choice of everyone as an MP3 player, many people have and do use the Treo 650, 600, perhaps even earlier ones still as their only portable music player. The Treo 700P, Palm’s latest version of the Treo, has features that make it a much more powerful device, all the more capable of replacing your primary MP3 player. The main feature that helps make the phone more powerful is its ability transfer data at much higher speeds than previously via a newer wireless (cellular, not Wifi) network technology, called EvDO. While the version of EvDO that’s currently available and accessible via the 700P is still not quite as fast as what most people have in their homes via their DSL or Cable Internet connection, it still ranges from three to ten times the speed of a dial-up modem. This speed will improve, especially when future versions of EvDO get deployed. The difference in speed means that your Treo can now stream live video and high-quality audio. You can download applications in seconds rather than minutes. Surfing the web is now a lot more like it is on a broadband connection on a PC, albeit with a much smaller screen. Just as broadband on the PC gives you more freedom to explore the Internet on demand, EvDO on a phone gives you more motivation to use it for accessing the Internet. It used to be that for many uses I would just delay what I needed to do until I got home because doing it on the slow data connection on my phone was too painful. It was only when I knew I wouldn’t be near a PC for a long time and I really needed to get some information on the web that I would use the Treo for accessing a website.

Another key new feature is the Treo 700P’s ability to handle memory cards that can hold more than 2GB, the limit of previous Treos. Although installing a hack could let you work around that limit on those older models, it required some degree of technical expertise to do. Now you can just plug in your 4GB SD card and it will work as a 4GB card without any extra work. Presumably when 8GB SD cards and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards come out in the next year or two, these will all work as well without additional software or hacking. While 4GB is still low compared to the storage on some MP3 players, it’s large enough to hold dozens of albums worth of music, not too shabby for a card the size of a postage stamp.

With these (and many other) new capabilities and a couple of new applications from third-party developers, it looks like the Treo 700P could easily replace an iPod for many people, myself included. The third party applications that I speak of are Motion Apps’ mOcean, CodeWave’s myTunesRSS, and Softick’s “Softick Audio Gateway.” There are additional applications that enhance the Treo’s multimedia capabilities worlds above the current iPods, but I’ll tackle those later.

Motion Apps’ mOcean is an MP3 player for the Treo that syncs with your iTunes library and actually has an interface that looks and acts a lot like an iPod. Obviously the Treo doesn’t have the famed iPod “clickwheel,” so instead mOcean provides a graphical version of the clickwheel that you can use via the Treo’s touchscreen. In fact, Apple is rumored to be coming out with similar touchscreen clickwheel interface for a future Video iPod that will do away with the physical clickwheel in order to recoup space for an expanded screen. It almost feels like I have a future iPod in my hands when I’m using mOcean! mOcean actually improves on the iPod in some ways due to the Treo having a keyboard – for example you can skip to the S’s in a large list of songs my just hitting the ’s’ key, rather than have to scroll with the clickwheel until you got all the way to the s’s. Although though there are some minor inconsistencies that probably in many cases only advanced iPod/iTunes users would notice, for the most part it is an extremely close replica of the iPod/iTunes experience, and Motion Apps appear to be constantly working on new features and functionality. The only obvious shortfall is the lack of ability to play AAC files and video files, but other programs are available on the Treo that that will do this, like the free TCPMP.

MyTunesRSS is a streaming server that you run on a PC that’s connected to the Internet. It syncs up with your iTunes library and makes your PC a streaming server for any audio and even video content that is in your iTunes (although for video you have a really good, fast connection for it to work well). For those of us with tens of gigabytes of audio and video files in our libraries, this allows you to have immediate access to your entire library without having to go out and buy ten or twenty 4GB memory cards, or have to wait until they come out with larger capacity cards. Of course, your ability to play these files is dependent on being in an area where you can get a data connection, and probably even an EvDO connection, which is still mostly in major metropolitan areas. So, for those who spend any time traveling or in more rural areas, this may not be a great solution.

The other piece of this content puzzle is something that isn’t quite as obvious, but for me was an important factor in realizing that using my Treo for listing to podcasts, audio books and music might be a better solution that using my iPod. If you have an MP3 player like an iPod and you’re listening to music and your cell phone rings, you have to shut off the iPod, take your earbuds out, and answer your phone, all before the caller on the other end hangs up. It can be a bit of a hassle, and if you have to use a handsfree device for your phone it makes it that much harder still. The 700P comes with a handsfree headset that doubles as stereo headphones. This allows you to listen to audio on your Treo, and then when a call comes in, it interrupts your music or podcast or audio book and prompts you to answer the phone, at which point the stereo headphones simply become a handsfree headset through which you can have a conversation. While this makes things a lot easier than having a phone and an MP3 player as separate devices, it still means you need to take the Treo out of your pocket or off your belt in order to answer the call.

Earlier this year, a company that has been making other well-known and useful software for the Treo and other Palm devices for years came out with a way to do this all wirelessly. Some quick background first. The wireless technology which I’m referring to here, and which you’ve undoubtedly heard of by now, is called “Bluetooth.” It was designed specifically for devices to communicate with other devices at short range (30 feet or less) and at relatively slow speeds (much slower than wireless networking known as Wifi). Probably the most popular use for this technology so far is the wireless headsets for cell phones that you might see planted in or over people’s ear. If that ear is on the side of their head that’s not visible to you, it’s easy to initially think they are talking to themselves when they are actually having a phone conversation. While Bluetooth has been very useful for this use, it does not, as you might expect, allow you to listen to audio other than that of a phone call. To listen to stereo music, you need to have a phone and a device that implements something called an Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, or A2DP, which allows wireless digital streaming of different types of digital audio formats fromone device to another. Unfortunately even the latest greatest Treo does not support A2DP. Fortunately for us, the genius programmers at Softick worked around this lack of capability of the Treo so that it could actually do A2DP with compatible Bluetooth stereo headsets that have started to become available in the last year or two. So now you don’t even have to bother with taking the Treo out of your pocket or off of your belt to answer a call while your listening to something. You can do everything wirelessly, including pausing the audio and skipping to the next or previous track. I can see one really nice use of this for me – I can now do yard work with a headset on and keep my Treo on the deck, safe from getting wet or full dirt!

A couple of caveats about this should be mentioned, though. While Softick’s program works on previous Treos, it still doesn’t quite work on the 700P. Palm updated the Bluetooth implementation on the 700P, breaking the compatibility, and so now Softick is hard at work trying to come up with a version that will work on the 700P – something that they are hoping to get out in the next week or so. Also, to be fair, you can buy Bluetooth headsets with an attachment that plugs into an iPod. This does add a considerable amount of bulk, though, to the otherwise fairly small iPod, making it a good deal larger than the Treo, although you could also use these on the much smaller iPod Nano.

When Apple came out with the Video iPod, it was the biggest leap in functionality since the first iPod debuted in 2001. The success of the video capability has convinced many movie and television companies to offer video for sale on the iTunes Music Store, or even for free over the Internet. And while mOcean still doesn’t sync video content yet, you can watch both streaming video as well as video files you’ve transferred from your computer to your Treo via a cabled hotsync. Not only that, but you can watch video in many more formats than you can with the iPod. The iPod allows only for a couple of types of Mpeg 4 formats, whereas programs like TCMP and Kinoma allow for AVI, DivX, XviD, and various Mpeg formats.

Finally, through yet additional third-party software and services, you can listen to or view a slew of additional content on your Treo that will not be possible on an iPod unless Apple actually develops an iPod phone that does EvDO, or an iPod with Wifi built in. Orb is a product that lets you use you stream all your audio, video, and even pictures to any computer capable of receiving them, and it has been tested successfully with the Treo 700P. Not only that, but if you have a TV Tuner card in your PC you can actually stream all the live channels you get through that tuner card as well. A similar service/product called Slingbox also will also let you do this, although they are still working on the software that will let you do this with a Treo. For those who subscribe to Satellite Radio, there is a way to use your Treo to stream your XM or Serius channels directly to your Treo. There are other streaming servers like Gloonet, and I’m sure ones that I’ve not even heard of yet, but the ones I’ve listed are probably the best known.

The iPod has become so popular for good reasons. It’s not just that it’s had a great marketing force behind it (although it has), or just great looks (that too), or that it was one of the first players to incorporate a hard drive that could store hundreds (or thousands) of songs. It’s also that the user interface on the iPod is for most people a very easy and intuitive one to operate. Its syncing abilities are also easy to set up and understand, at least compared to most other platforms out there. iTunes, the PC part of the iPod, is also pretty streightward and manages music (and now video) in a simple and powerful way.

I realize that some people truly don’t want anything but a small device to play their 30 favorite albums on, and for them, I suppose, an iPod (as well as many other MP3 players) is still a great choice. Heck, for them, anything more than an iPod Nano would be overkill. However, for those of us who are always looking for more powerful gadgets, ones that can serve most if not all of our requirements for a portable device (be they to listen to audio, watch video, make phone calls, read email, etc., etc.) the Treo 700P really is a powerhouse of convergence. With the services and software I’ve mentioned in this article, it can do everything and much more than current iPod models, and with mOcean can even look and act like an iPod. It does this at a price that’s at least equivalent to the top 60GB iPod model (if you buy the Treo 700P along with a 2-year cell phone contract), or at most for a couple hundred more, if paying buying at the top retail price with no discounts. The main disadvantage to the Treo, other than what some people would consider to be it’s inferior look fashion-wise, is the fact that it doesn’t have a big built-in hard drive. While 4GB is a lot for some people, and certainly is still the most you can have on an iPod Nano as of now, it still pales in comparison to the mammoth 60GB hard drive in the top-of-the-line iPod model. With myTunesRSS and other streaming solutions, you can get around this, but you are still dependent on having an EvDO signal, which is still far from ubiquitous. EvDO coverage will increase, of course, as will memory card capacities, making this less of an issue, but for now, some will still consider it too much of a limitation to give up their iPod altogether. Plus, as coverage and storage capacity increases on the Treo, it’s unlikely that the iPod will stand still. The rumor is that a new video iPod with a much larger screen will come out later this year and will make watching video on the Treo look weak in comparison. Along with that bigger screen may come additional features that will remove more advantages of the Treo, such as Bluetooth or Wifi capability.

For right now, though, the Treo does still seem to win in all but storage capacity. Heck, even its battery is replaceable, unlike the infamous non-replaceable iPod’s! I for one am going to ditch my iPod. That doesn’t mean I won’t be tempted by future ones. If a new one comes out that has a screen twice the size of my Treo’s, it’s going to be hard to resist. Then again, since I don’t watch nearly as much video as I do listen to audio podcasts, audio books, and music, it would be hard to justify having both of these. Hopefully, though, Palm’s next Treo will also sport a larger screen, or at least a video output as the iPod does which allows for plugging in video goggles that make screen size irrelevant!

Luminous Landscapes just did a review of the Epson P-2000 Picture Viewer and it seems to be a real winner. I’ve been covering the P-2000 since we first started hearing about it a couple months back because it’s been one of those devices that I think has some real promise in appealing to a broader cross-section of users.

Epson’s main business is in printing and imaging, and so it’s pretty predictable that such a device is geared toward the photographic industry – especially now that digital has taken over all but some of the higher end medium and large format ranges as well as the ultra-cheap instamatic and disposable end of the spectrum.

Ever since digital cameras came out, there’s been a continual effort at figuring out storage solutions. Various types of memory cards have served primarily, although Sony in particular has done a lot with more static optical media. But very early on, there were third-party companies (for some reason I never saw a camera company come out with one, although Nikon finally did just last month) selling devices that became known as “digital wallets.” There was an actual product name called “digital wallet” (you can still read a review of it on Steve’s Digicams), but like so many of these companies, they eventually went out of business. Other such companies and products have come and gone, and some had real promise but for whatever reason could not get their product into mainstream consumer electronics retail outlets, and this lack of availability and lack of confidence in the staying power of the company motivated most photographers, amateur and professional alike, to switch to a solution that many of them have at their disposal anyway – a laptop. Certainly laptops are not as portable as these digital wallets are, but you can carry them around to most locations, or at least have them at your hotel room ready to dump image files onto from your memory cards at the end of each day.

So, why I believe that the P-2000 could shake things up here is for a few reasons. One is that Epson is a big, respected name brand. They are not some company that you’ve never heard of that only produces one product. Secondly, it looks like with the P-2000, they’ve gotten everything right. While it could be slightly smaller, the P-2000 has pretty much everything you would want in device for storing images, but more importantly it has capabilities that will appeal to non-photographers. It’s ability to play audio, but more importantly video files, makes it into a true “Portable Media Player” device.

There are a number of companies that are competing in the PMP market, including Archos, VTec, iRiver, Vosonic, Smartdisk, Creative, Nikon, etc. As you can see, most of these are not big names. Also, there seems to be a divide between the brands geared toward Photographers (Nikon, Vosonic, Smartdisk and others) which have the ability to read memory cards directly, and the ones geared more to the general user who wants to listen to music, LOOK at images, and watch video (all the others). It’s not very well known by the general populace that the photo-oriented PMP’s ALSO do a lot of what the non-oriened ones do – they will play many audio and video formats in addition to being a temporary or permanent storage hold for your digital images. It’s unfortunate that these players aren’t being marketed more broadly (I’ve never seen them in a Best Buy or Circuit City for example). Part of the issue may be their relatively larger size than many of the non-photo-oriented PMP’s, but I still think that small amount of additional size is made up for in terms of their utility as a great supplement to the increasingly ubiquitous digital camera. Until most digital camera’s start coming with their own large hard drive’s built in instead of memory cards, the photo-oriented features are only going to increase in value.

The P-2000, it seems, is following many of these other photo-oriented PMP’s in that it is being marketed mainly to photographers and not as a general consumer electronics device. Maybe the quality of the product and the Epson name will finally create a standard bearer in this product category, like the iPod is with MP3 players, but I would have liked it if Epson would have marketed it to everyone, because it really has just as much appeal as any of those other PMP’s, plus the added value to people who take a lot of digital photos. Maybe Epson would rather be the big fish in a little pond, but I for one think they are selling themselves short.

You hear about “convergence” a lot these days, but I think it’s one of those over-hyped concepts which because of that loses some of its meaning. When people talk about convergence, they are talking about creating devices that serve multiple purposes. So far the big ones out there in my mind are smartphones that have the functions of a PDA, a phone, and an internet device, among others, but also PMP’s, which can play music, videos, show pictures, or just serve as portable hard drive. Why does this have an allure? Well, there’s the obvious issue of portability. No one wants to have to carry a whole bag of gadgets with them wherever they go, or for that matter put a device in all your pants and jacket pockets. The other issue is convenience. Why not have your PDA with all your contacts in the same casing as your phone so that you can call anyone or email them without having to go look on your computer or another portable device? Or for that matter take pictures and email them with the same device? Yet another issue but one that’s maybe not discussed as much is price. It really does help when you can fit a bunch of products into one, even it costs $500. If you tried to buy these things separately you could easily go over this price, but companies know that they can only go so high even with this kind of device before people will simply balk because they don’t want to spend such a large chunk of cash on something they will be taking everywhere with them (and consequently will be more at risk for breakage or being stolen). As technology improves, such devices will only start converging more and these individual product categories will go away. You’ll have an all-in-one device, but it may not even need to have a “cell phone” within, but rather a software application that can allow for audible communication over the Internet ala Voice Over IP. Cellular networks of the future will probably merge with wide-area internetworking hotspots that use technologies like Wimax or the even more advanced Mobile-Fi to provide a similar ubiquitous connection as current cellular networks do. We probably won’t see this for at least three or four years, but I’m convinced it will happen in less than ten years. Then, thankfully, we can just deal with one device category and no niche markets per se. You won’t have to go to one type of store to buy a device that has one feature and to another for another. Some will say that having devices dedicated to a single purpose allows for that device to perfect functionality, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. The problem is that this is a tradeoff that most people have decided is worth having if they can save a lot of money and space and have something that meets 98% of their needs and does so with a quality level that for most is perfectly fine. The “snobs” or “philes” or whatever you might call them may still go for the component design that perfects the experience at large financial cost, but as with current audio and video markets, these users will be a small minority.

I just got some additional info from Epson about the P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer (AKA PhotoFine). I’ve written before about the P-2000, which to me looks like one of the best Personal Media Players out there because it not only caters to the general consumer, but to the high-end amateur, or even professional photographer. Here are a few new things that I hadn’t seen before:

• Ultra fine high precision processing for close positioning and alignment of pixels, thereby increasing pixel count to 256 per square inch for better resolution and detail (I can only imagine this will look very nice, and viewing a dvd video capture at full resolution on such a small screen should be quite impressive!)

• View images from memory card without downloading to the hard drive (I can see this being useful for some digital photographers. For example, say you don’t have the time to transfer all your images, but just want a quick way to view them (and show others) on the road. Instead of compromising your camera’s battery by having them view the images on the camera, simply transfer the memory card over to the P-2000 and view them on a much larger screen)

• NTSC or PAL (this is a nice feature so that one can hook the P-2000 up to TV’s and not have to worry about the compatibility with different TV signal standards in different parts of the world)

• Speaker: Dynamic (symbol) 28 x 1 (Mono) (I’m not really sure what this means except that maybe the P-2000 has a mono speaker on it, presumably for listening to sound files or the audio that accompanies the video files. While Stereo would have been better, it probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference coming out of a small speaker. Let’s face it, most of the time, you would probably use headphones for this purpose, but it’s nice to know that you can actually share the audio without having to go out and buy accessories like a portable speaker system.)

• 5.8” x 3.3” x 1.2” in. (W x H x D) Weight: 415 g or 1 lb. with battery (So, here we can finally compare it to other players. Let’s use the iPod Photo as an example. The iPod Photo measures 4.1 x 2.4 x .75 and weighs 6.4 oz. So, we’re talking about something almost twice as thick, almost 50% wider, and almost 50% longer. This isn’t a big shocker to me, because around 2/3 of the real-estate on the front is the screen. The screen measures 3.8 inches on the diagonal. Compare that to half that – 2 inches – for the iPod Photo, which takes up only about ¼ of the front. You also get 640 x 480 pixels, almost ten times the number of pixels as the 220 x 176 on the Photo iPod. So yes, it’s not going to fit nearly as well in your pocket as an iPod, and at twice the weight it will weight you down a bit more, but if your priority is actually viewing images on the device and not just using it as a portable hard drive or something to plug into a larger display like a TV, there’s just no question about which is the superior device).

This product category seems to be getting more and more filled with new devices, and I’ll be trying to cover some of the others as they emerge as well. I would love to do a hands on review of the P-2000, but unfortunately I’m still not mass-market enough for companies to be sending me loaners units and I don’t have lots of disposable income lying around to buy new gadgets left and right. I’ll have to see how much access I can get to some of these devices at a local retail establishment and take a few furtive pictures with my camera phone!

When I first heard about the new Epson P-2000, I thought it would be the perfect convergence media device. It has a hard drive and plays a bunch of different audio and video formats, and, given Epson’s reputation in the photographic print business, it provides some features not seen on other such devices, like ports for different memory sizes and support for numerous digital photo RAW file formats. With its huge 3.8” LCD and profusion of features, I suspected it would be at least as much as its predecessor, the P-1000, but Epson has actually dropped the price to $500! And it will be out next month here in the U.S.! Considering it has a 40GB hard drive, the same as the iPod’s current top-of-the line, plus has a huge amount of additional functionality, I can’t see why someone would pick the iPod instead.

Oh I suppose there is the user interface to consider. It’s hard to beat Apple in that area. But the UI on the P-2000 would have to be mighty clunky to opt for an iPod. Also, what about Apple’s online digital music store iTunes? For those who have downloaded a bunch of songs or hope to in the future, will this device be able to? It’s unclear. It is supposed to support AAC files, which is the format Apple uses with iTunes, but it’s not clear if that automatically means it can support iTunes specific DRM. I’m sure Apple controls which devices can and can’t access their DRM’d files and so far there’s been no mention from any camp. There is one more issue which probably is not a big one for most but is for me, and that is that I use the iPod primarily to listen to audio books that I download from Audible.com. These also have a proprietary DRM and while they can be played on an iPod, that also doesn’t mean by extension that they can be played by any device that can play an AAC file. I’ve been attempting to get answers to these questions from the various parties and I will post any information as soon as I get it.

Link to Gizmodo

Vosonic, a British company that’s been making portable hard drive solutions for digital photographers for a while now, recently introduced a couple of devices that are seeking, like the Epson P-2000, to converge the photography-oriented device with a more general-consumer Portable Media Player (PMP) device.

The MMV VP6300 comes with a 20GB hard drive, lets you play MP3’s, WMA’s, Mpeg-1, and Motion Jpeg on its 2-inch color LCD. It looks a whole lot like an iPod to me, and I think the only reason why this device is still being displayed on Vosonic’s page is that it’s not yet sold officially in the U.S., and so Apple probably can’t bully them legally over the pond quite as quickly and effectively. The device also takes most memory formats, you can plug it to your TV to watch/listen to its content, and even has a remote control. Sadly, it seems not to have any U.S. distributors, so if you live in the U.S. you will have to buy it either directly from Vosonic (if that’s even possible), or more likely through third unofficial parties through eBay.

The XS-DRIVE Super VP6210 comes in various sizes ranging from 20GB up to a whopping 80GB, but is a bit larger than the MMV VP6300. Its LCD, while it looks smaller, is only smaller in comparison to the larger size of the unit as a whole – it is the same 2 inches as the VP6300. In addition to the formats of the VP6300, the XS-Drive also plays AVI, and “MOD” which I think may be a typo meaning “MOV” or QuickTime. Everything else looks to be about the same as the VP6300.

The one problem I see for both of these is that they apparently can only show Jpeg images. This will be fine for the vast majority of folks, but for the serious photographer who takes images in RAW format, at least part of the time, it’s a serious limitation. The other issue I see is that for those who want to buy albums on Apple’s iTunes music store, these devices don’t support the AAC format like the Epson P-200. Then again, they do support WMA, which is Microsoft’s format that has DRM (copy protection scheme), so when MS’s music store gets off the ground, there will be an alternative. While these are pretty nice-looking devices, the much larger screen of the P-2000 and its support for RAW format files so far for me still give it the edge. And of course the fact that it comes from a large, well-respected company like Epson and is being officially sold in the U.S. through the normal distribution channels. These devices could be spectacular, but I, and I’m sure a lot of other people, would feel nervous about buying something from a relatively small, little-known company. What kind of support is going to be available if a unit I buy stops working? Will I have to send it overseas and wait weeks before I get a replacement or the unit fixed?

Previously I mentioned a new Epson photo viewer slash personal media player (PMP) called the Photo Fine Player P-2000. The device has finally been officially announced, but I cannot find anything on Epson’s site or anywhere besides PhotographyBlog. It looks like most of the previous rumors were accurate. Additionally it has a pretty large 3.8 screen that can display images in VGA (640×480) resolution. Still no word on the AAC format and whether it could conceivably support Apple’s iTunes store for music purchases, or even Audible.com .aa format audio book files, but that does bring us to a relates story.

There have been rumors over the past few years about Apple coming out with a new iPod with a color screen that can display photos as well as do all the other iPod stuff. Well, it seems as if this rumor has popped up again and the sites commenting about it seem somewhat convinced that it is likely to be true. The new iPod is rumored to have a 60GB hard drive (which is supposed to hold upwards of 20,000 songs or 25,000 images), and a color screen that is the same size as current iPod screens. If this proves to be true, I’m glad that Apple is finally getting into the PMP market, since it will just add to overall competition that is good for consumers.

According to the rumor, the new iPod has something that most PMP’s don’t, the ability to take memory cards. The article lists “memory stick slots.” What I take this to mean is that it has more than one memory card slot. I think the author was using “memory stick” to mean the general memory card rather than what memory sticks are – the specific format that only Sony devices use. Otherwise, the usefulness of the slot would be relegated to Sony digital cameras, no doubt a sizeable chunk of the digicam market, but still a minority of that market as a whole. No word on the iPod being able to play video formats. If it did, my guess is that it would probably only support Quicktime video, another Apple format.

The rumors about the new iPod make it out to be more of a way to view pictures, but with the screen being pretty small, its more likely to be something that you hook up to a TV at a friend’s house rather than doing a lot of viewing on the device itself. The P-2000 on the other hand seems to be trying to merge the more consumer-oriented PMP market with one that might be more geared to serious photographers. Although prices for memory cards have been sliding at an ever-faster rate, the higher-capacity cards (2GB and up) are still pretty pricey, especially if you compare them to the capacities of these PMP’s of 20GB to now possibly 60GB. With file sizes increasing due to higher resolution capabilities and some people using RAW formats that take up more space than jpeg, cards can get filled up pretty quickly. This is especially true when you’re on travel, or filming a big event like a wedding. You can always take a laptop with you to dump your pictures onto the hard drive so that you can reuse the card for taking more pictures, but laptops aren’t nearly as portable as something the size of a PMP, and are usually a lot more expensive. But add the capacity of direct print, being able to view multiple RAW format files, and you can see that the P-2000 is geared a bit more toward the photographer rather than the general consumer. But the P-2000 also has MPEG-4, MP3, and AAC support, so it’s certainly attractive to the general consumer as well.

Of course, we don’t really know enough about the new iPod - even if it exists! – to say whether it how well or poorly it will compete, but I’m sure it will do well if for no other reason than it is an iPod. The large userbase of those who are familiar with the platform will motivate a lot of sales, in addition to it inevitably synching with iPhoto, a very popular image-cataloging program for Macs. Simply the Apple name will probably give it a lot of clout, as there are few big names in the PMP arena. Sure Epson is a big name in printers, but not in other consumer electronics. Archos is well known among those who follow the portable music or media markets, but that’s it. So many people may use the respected brand name of Apple to finally get into this product category.

Ok, maybe this isn’t exactly a PMP, but it’s definitely worth a look. Sandisk has just announced a device they are calling “Photo Album” that will serve multiple purposes, such as being a standard memory card reader, an MP3 player (MP3 being the only audio format it supports), and a “photo album.” It also plays Mpeg-1 files, but no MPEG-4. It’s an interesting idea, but one that probably still needs a bit of work. For one, there is no internal memory, so in order to play anything, one has to save it onto a memory card first, then insert it into the device. Not a big deal if you have a digital camera and can just take the card you’ve been using in the camera and plug it in, but what if you want to listen to MP3’s too? In other words you are faced with the dilemma that in order to use the device for multiple purposes you really should buy multiple memory cards. Yes, it’s possible to store photos and MP3’s on the same card, but I’d rather keep things separate. Memory prices are going down, so you could buy a couple of 1GB cards for under $100 each and put 300 or more songs on one and a similar number of high-res images on another. Or, if you resize and compress your images a bit, you could fit 3,000 or more on the same card. The one problem with viewing pictures on it is that it doesn’t have a screen! That’s right! The idea is you plug it into any TV and watch the pictures on that. Due to the need for a TV (or computer) and the size being a little bit bulky (not huge but not really something you could easily fit in your pocket), I wouldn’t really call this a portable solution. The other downside when it comes to viewing pictures is that it only displays jpegs. That’s fine for most consumers, but for more serious amateurs or professionals, the ability to view raw format files is pretty important. Luckily, my current camera has the ability to produce a highly-compressed jpeg image in addition to the main raw format file, but then again my camera, like most digicams that have come out over the last 4 years (maybe all?), it has a video cable that will let you connect it to a TV, thus negating the need for a separate device for doing this. The nice thing about this device is that it is fairly inexpensive at $50, so one could think of it as simply as a card reader with some extra functionality tacked on that could be very useful. But unless I’m in the market for a new card reader and this is discounted to no more than $20 more than a plain card reader, I’m probably not going to even consider it…

Most of the “convergence” devices out there involve the telephone and the computer, but not the TV, or at least not the broadcast part of TV – more just the element of TV as a monitor for playing pre-recorded video. But Sanyo, anyway, looks like they may introduce a phone with an honest-to-goodness TV tuner, and a digital one at that. The fact that it’s digital means that it could theoretically display high-definition content, although for a screen the size of matchbook, I hardly think you would be able to tell the difference.

Live broadcasts are something that’s so far been somewhat missing in such devices. Sure you can go up online and look at news on a website, or you can even have SMS messages sent to you with news headlines and brief stories. But the immediacy of live TV or even Radio just hasn’t made it. Since we’ve had portable TV’s for at least a couple of decades and portable radios for a lot longer, it’s a bit surprising to me. I mean portable radios have gotten so miniscule that adding them to a phone would mean little if any additional real estate.

What’s really needed for all of these devices is a screen that will make viewing a pleasure rather than a chore of squinting. The screen would have to use technology we currently don’t see in consumer devices but which has been developed and probably will be coming out some time in the next 5 or 10 years. The technology is called “liquid polymers” and it allows displays that are thin, flexible, and cheap. Theoretically these screens could be folded or rolled so that you could carry them inside of a small device or phone that could fit in your pocket or belt, but when you wanted to watch something for a longer period (not just a quick check to see who’s calling, etc.), then you’d just open the compartment, and unfold the screen and all of a sudden you have a monitor-sized screen but with the dimensions and weight of a piece of paper. Pretty damn cool!

By way of Gizmodo, there’s news of a new portable device by Epson that can display pictures, download them from Compact Flash or SD cards, and possibly play music and videos. The only information available right now is in Japanese, so I’m not even sure when or if this will make it to market outside of Japan, but it looks pretty exciting as a kind of convergence media device. Also, because this is in Japanese, I can’t really be sure of what the device is supposed to offer. What’s included below is just guesswork based on the few non-Japanese words and the pictures, so take what’s below with a grain of salt! And if anyone reading this knows Japanese and do a bit of translating, that would be great help!

The device, called the P-2000 Photo Fine Player, looks like it is designed primarily to view and download images. It looks like one possible feature may be to allow the user to zoom in to a smaller area within a picture and move around, as well as getting a kind of contact sheet of multiple images so that one can quickly move to the an image and display it. Apparently the device can display RAW image files from a series of Nikon and Canon cameras, but no Fuji or Olympus RAW, at least not listed. It looks like one can also hook the device directly to a TV or monitor for displaying pictures or other media, as well as hook the device to a printer (at least one that uses Epson’s USB Direct Print protocol) for printing things without involving a separate computer.

As far as this “other media” goes, all I can see is the mention of MPEG-4, a type of video format that allows for very good compression rates, and QuickTime, which MPEG-4 is based on. There’s also a mention of “motion jpeg” which displays full jpeg images as movies, thus is compressed only to the point that individual jpegs are compressed – it’s not a scheme in use nearly to the extent that QuickTime or MPEG-4 are.

The device also plays audio. MP3 is mentioned as well as AAC. AAC is a file format that like MP3 is lossy, but whose compression scheme is better, allowing for higher quality audio even with higher compression rates. The other big advantage to having AAC support is that this is the format Apple uses for it’s iTunes downloadable music files. However, I’m not sure whether simply supporting AAC also means that one can play such files on this device, since the AAC files that Apple provides have a copy-protection mechanism built in which may not be supported by the device.

While there are other “PMP” (Personal Media Player) devices out there that serve those who want to want to both listen to music, watch movies, and view pictures on the go, this is the first one that I’ve seen that also seems to add the functionality that is critical for serious digital photographers – the ability to directly download pictures from memory cards. The large capacity can hold over 6,000 of the largest files my 6-Megapixel D70 can produce, making it a pretty long-term portable storage device if one can’t take an actual laptop on location or load up on hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of storage cards. Also the ability to hold the files on a more portable device than the camera itself with what looks like a larger screen and the ability to manage the images to some extent would just make this all the better.

A couple of pertinent questions come to mind other than the most obvious ones of whether it will actually be sold outside of Japan and if so when. First, the rate at which various other card reader/storage solutions like this can download images seems to vary quite a bit. Belkin makes a couple of devices for the iPod that will do basically everything this will but without any viewing capability. The main problem with it and the reason I haven’t bought it is that the speed they transfer images is exceedingly slow, upwards of a half hour for a 512MB card with 80 pictures. This may be ok for a lot of people, but if you are doing some moderately heavy shooting where hundreds of pictures and several 512MB cards are necessary, this sped just won’t cut it. Aside from which apparently transferring even one 512MB card depletes the iPod’s battery so much that you really can’t use it for more than this without then charging it for a much longer period of time before the next card is downloaded. Other dedicated devices, such as the Flashtrax, are said to be a lot faster.

Then there’s the little question of price. If this thing is priced at a hefty $700 or more, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given all its capabilities, this could put it out of reach for a most people. Of course professional photographers will probably not be as fazed, since it’s easy to pay twice this for a really good lense, let alone a DSLR camera body. But the average consumer could get just as much use out of this as a professional or serious amateur photographer, since a huge number of people now have digital cameras and it only takes a long vacation to demonstrate how quickly memory cards can be eaten up unless you take your laptop and do daily dumps of your images onto it.

I for one love to see such devices and hope more companies come out with them. One wonderful feature I can think of would be a keyboard so that one can either rename images easily, or change metadata for a given image. The ability to hook the device to a cell phone (via wires or wireless) to upload your images online would be great, although even for one 6MB file, this might take an excruciatingly long period of time with current mobile phone speeds. Eventually, I would hope one could go into a Blockbuster or other such place and download any movie one desires via a kiosk. But I guess such kiosks could be placed anywhere and could also offer any music as well as movie or tv show. Pairing such a device eventually with a smartphone and giving it the ability to communicate via Wimax and/or Wireless USB would enable buying and downloading media virtually anywhere. This is all pretty far away, but maybe not as far away as it seems. The technologies all exist in one for or another and except for the expense in creating such a device and the need for it to be relatively small, it could be created right now, more or less.

There’s been a slew of news recently that would have us believe that the iPod will no longer have the easy road it’s been on as the dominant MP3 player over the last few years. I have had an iPod for about a year now, and while I certainly enjoy it, I am in no way the religious adherent that some iPod fanatics are. In fact, I’ve never owned an Apple product OTHER than the iPod. However, I don’t see the iPod going away just yet. I do like all this additional competition, though, because theoretically it will only make the iPod better and cheaper. At the same time certain aspects of this competition can only cause chaos in the digital music world, which is not a good thing, really, for anyone..

Justin Blanton writes that “Obviously The Ipod is Dead” because they are refusing to “converge” with other devices like mobile phones, at least so far. He predicts that phones will eventually have hard drives that will enable them to play as much music as an iPod, or do even more. This may be true, but even now one can buy a “convergence device” like the Treo 600 for which one can buy 1GB memory cards capable of holding upwards of 300 songs each. Samsung will soon be coming out with 16GB cards that would hold more than the smaller 15GB iPod. Hard drives, or even built-in 4GB flash modules will, I’m sure, come to convergence devices in the not too distant future, especially as solid state memory prices continue to plummet. Will this kill the iPod? I doubt it. The problem is that such devices still carry a premium. A $700 phone is a lot more of an impediment – especially for a teen or 20-something – than a $300 iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Treo and use it for tons of things, but at the same time, I recognize that MP3 players like my iPod were made specifically with listening to audio in mind. Of course Apple’s design sense doesn’t hurt either. Apple has just one product in this category and they have worked continuously over the last few years to hone its functionality. On the other hand my Treo can play some formats that the iPod won’t, thankfully, and that brings me to the main thrust of this piece.

In the hunt to consolidate a market share in the digital music arena, Apple introduced their music download store, iTunes. Unfortunately, this store uses the AAC file format for copy prevention, and this format so far is not supported in almost any other player aside from the iPod. The iPod can also play the older and open MP3 format, but it cannot play a more advanced open format called Ogg Vorbis, nor can it play Microsoft’s Windows Media File (WMA) format, which is now supported on the vast majority of non-iPod players.

Two other big players in this arena have stepped up to the plate in an effort to compete with Apple. Microsoft has been pushing their WMA and has gotten it supported by many players (in addition to it’s PockePC devices and phones), and is not introducing its own music service to compete with iTunes. Sony, which has been making audio players much longer than Apple, may finally be thinking about adding MP3 capability to it’s players. Up until now, such devices would only use Sony’s proprietary Atrak format, a format also used by Sony’s new download service.

Sony owns a huge percentage of the popular music out there (not to mention the movies that could eventually make the jump to portability plus downloadability via sites like iTunes), and thus can dominate in this area especially if they finally offer MP3 (and possibly WMA) capability as may be the case. Sony is the king of proprietary formats, though, and the decision isn’t official.

In my thinking, unless something changes, we will eventually see a playing field where people just buy the device based on how well they work, and how programmable they are. Programmers (or hackers if you will) will (they already have in some cases) find ways to skirt both the copy protection mechanisms of these formats and the formats themselves so that they can be converted from one type of file to another, or at least make it so that they can be played on devices they weren’t meant to be played on.

In other words, the music industry still hasn’t learned its lesson from Napster. They should be banding together and offering music in the most attractive form. This means not only low prices, but also flexibility in how people can listen to it. By making things inconvenient and expensive, they are only driving the hackers to fill the justifiable desire on the part of consumers for a straightforward solution that allows them the maximum amount of choice (in terms of both devices and content) possible.

The iPod won’t die because it isn’t any less proprietary than the other devices paired with services out there. It may be relegated to second place, though, if Sony comes out with competing devices that also play downloadable movies. But unless all of these companies stop adhering to a battle-camp mentality where customers have to buy a Sony device in order to hear Sony content, or an Apple device to buy Apple content, etc., they will be fighting a losing battle. Consumers don’t care what company produced the content! They care only about the music (or movie). It’s inevitable that they will want to hear a substantial variety of music whose rights are owned by a variety of companies. Maybe in 20 or 30 years none of this will matter as more and more artists take the Indy route – especially if the trend continues of the content Giants not learning the lessons of history to adapt or hunker down and perish. But for the near future, anyway, this situation will just breed anger and a desire to defeat any restraint these companies want to put around the necks (ears?) of their customers.

Maybe Audible.com would be a good example for such companies. Audible.com provides downloadable audio books from a great number of publishers – either producing the recordings themselves or converting earlier books on tape or CD to their, yes, PROPRIETARY format. Yet, Audible has worked with many manufacturers since it’s inception in the late 90’s to make drivers for a huge number of devices. They didn’t just pick one brand and refuse to work with other companies because of some “strategic partnership.” And because of this one can listen to Audible.com content on Treo Cell phones and their competitor PocketPC phones, on Apple’s iPod, and on its competitor hard-drive based as well as flash memory MP3 players. Audible is now more successful than ever, at least if you view stock price as measure of success! True, Audible does not manufacture any devices themselves and this makes it easier for them to work with multiple manufacturers, whereas Apple offering iTunes for Sony devices would be creating more competition for their own iPod. But perhaps what this means is that companies should either sell the content that people want to hear or see, or they should make the devices, but not both. If they make both, there is just too much interest for them to create a firewall where they pair their device and content and make both incompatible with all other content and devices.