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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Wherefore Art Thou Portable Media Center?
Yesterday Creative Labs announced their Zen Vision, a very drool-worthy player with a list of killer features. Let me summarize: a 3.7" VGA screen, only 0.78" thick, a magnesium shell in either black or white, 30 GB hard drive, USB 2.0, 4.5 hours video playback battery life, video format support for MPEG-1/2/4-SP, Windows Media Video (WMV) 9, Motion-JPEG, DivX 4 and 5, and Xvid-SP3. It plays back MP3, WMA, and DRM'd WMA because it's playsforsure-compliant. In fact, it boasts the playsforsure video logo, which is the first time I've seen that - meaning it will play DRM-protected WMV. It's got a CompactFlash slot, and with a CF adaptor, can accept almost any other type of memory card. 3.5mm headphone jack, audio and video out (still composite though). All in all, an impressive device.
Take a step back and think about what this should have been: a second-generation Portable Media Center. It's not - Creative loaded their own custom OS on this thing. Let's compare this Zen Vision to their Zen Portable Media Center, which is still being sold on their site. The Zen PMC is $100 more, has 10 GB less storage, is thicker, heavier, lacks any media card slot, has 1/4th the screen resolution, and is much more restricted in it's playback of video formats. On the plus side, it has a bigger battery, and 0.1" bigger screen...and that's about the only way it's better than the Zen Vision.
Don't get me wrong, I thought the Zen PMC was a decent first effort from Creative, though it was underwhelming from a hardware perspective considering around the same time we were seeing VGA Pocket PCs with dedicated GPU acceleration. The lack of a media card slot is what made the Zen PMC useless for me, and while the PMC OS was certainly easy to use, it didn't exactly do a lot. That didn't surprise me though, because Microsoft's goal was to create a very usable, very friendly device - and they succeeded. When you look at the awkward user interfaces of other media devices on the market, the PMC was a breath of fresh air. But many people, myself included, were waiting for the next version - the version where they actually impressed us, and was priced more aggressively.
The Zen Vision delivers on all that and more, but it's running a custom OS (embedded Linux?). From a hardware perspective, the new Zen Vision looks like it was meant for the Portable Media Center OS - but Creative didn't go that route, which to me spells trouble for the PMC. With only three partners making the hardware (Samsung, iRiver, Creative), the PMC platform wasn't exactly on strong footing to begin with. And now, a key partner releases a killer media device that's not running the PMC OS. Where does that leave the PMC? Unless we see a new release of PMC hardware before the end of 2005, unfortunately I think that leaves the PMC dead in the water.
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