handheld media players

came into office this morning and my female colleague happily announced that she wanna buy the new iPod, the one that plays video.

i remembered last week at Sitex, that Apple kid was eagerly demo'ing it to us the video capability. that time hor, i thought - kua vileo on that thing?? zun bor??!!

now, i have nothing against iPod, in fact, i quite like it one, i think its one of the chioest MP3 players around. but hey, if i wanna watch video, i would wanna watch it big big ok! the screen on this baby only takes up 40% of the surface area, how to be big like that??

we had a lil' argument on this, me, the gal, and another of colleague who happened to like this iPod as well - we do this from time to time, so its a constructive healthy little 'discussion' la!

anyway back to my point about the screen. i think i rather go for the PSP or Creative Zen Vision but cannot like this compare la, MP3 player vs game console vs media player, not fair mah. so then what is it that i wan on a handheld media player? let's see...

Big screen
this is definitely a must! com'on, me watching video ok, and i not so young already. mai stress gua ay bak jiu (dun stress my eyes) le... 16:9 aspect ratio will be good if i am gonna be watch movies.

Good format and codec support
this one is also very important. now got many codecs like DivX, VxiD, H.264 and for audio streams, MP3, Ogg, AC3 etc. and they can be packaged into different file formats like AVI, MKV, OGM. so its important that the player can support many many standards. i choose simi, it plays simi... best!

Subtitle support
some ang moh shows, the characters like to murmur to themselves one. bopian have to read subtitles. now very used to reading subs liaoz. this is also one reason for the big screen.

Upgradable firmware & good developer support
of course if the player doesn't support so many formats/codecs its still ok as long as it can be flashed in later. and there should be good developer support to write these upgrades also. flashable but no one to write also no use wat...

Decent audio quality
i am not too particular about audio when it comes to watching shows.

Windows file system support
pls, i dun need another software to be installed just so that you can push ads/songs/movies to me i can transfer files to the player. i think Windows Explorer works jus fine. and dun make me reencode videos for the player hor. so ma huan...

for those reasons, i am still happily sticking to my trusty Palm Tungsten T3 with TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player). TT3 with the slider extended fully, i get a 16:9 screen which occupies like 75-80% of the PDA body. TCPMP is an open source software. they have a list of file formats/codecs it supports. but too bad, dun have subtitle support, and the internal memory on TT3 cannot be used for video files so only can store on SD card.

mabbe its time to upgrade... sis jio jio'ing me to go get LifeDrive. hmm... i need a sponsor. part sponsorship also can la. heehee...