Mp3 player portable speaker

In football, the game of the century seems to happen twice a decade. In technology, paradigm shifts are declared with similar frequency—so much so that you may not recognize when the big one actually hits. The portable media player may be one such major shift, cementing the relationship between computer and entertainment technology.

By our count, this is the fourth major shift in portable personal entertainment in half a century (and the second in five years): the transistor radio, the Sony Walkman, the MP3 player, and the portable media player. Going well beyond the MP3 player, the portable media player adds a color display for playback of photos and video along with audio. The Portable Media Center (PMC for short) is Microsoft's vision of the portable media player. The first three PMC devices are relatively polished: The Creative Zen, the iRiver PMP-120, and the Samsung Yepp YH-120. Of the three we examined, the Creative was essentially complete, and the iRiver had a few unfinished aspects. The Samsung unit was a couple of weeks behind in development, so we were unable to test it.

We've seen portable media players before, notably the Archos AV420 and Panasonic's SV-AV multifunction devices. But those don't have the advantage of integration with Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10 for synchronization of media files.

The first PMC devices look somewhat different from one another yet share common attributes. For shape and size, imagine an inch-thick stack of postcards or a portable game player weighing three-quarters of a pound, though the Samsung model is nearly square, more like a little TV, and a third smaller than the others (4.2 by 3.8 by 0.8 inches, HWD). PMCs are priced at about $500 for 20GB models; they have quarter-VGA color displays measuring about 3.5 inches in diagonal.

Controls include a green Windows button that takes you to a main-menu screen that resembles that of Windows XP Media Center Edition. Using the four directional buttons (plus an OK button in the middle), you scroll among your choices: My Pictures, My Music, My Video, My TV, and Settings. The front panels also have media transport buttons: start, pause, stop, forward, reverse. There's a tiny speaker (so you don't always need to use headphones) and a video-out jack (so you can hook up to a TV set or stereo). You can transfer data files if you feel the need to do a backup on the road with a laptop, but the process is not as easy as using a one-touch external USB drive.

Using Windows Media Player 10 and Windows XP on your host PC, you can synchronize playlists of video, recorded TV shows, photos, and audio. The PMCs also have enough built-in intelligence to transcode (into formats the player uses) and compress files so you pack a lot of information on the devices. A PMC can play WMA and MP3 files, including rights-managed files downloaded legally from online music services, but not iTunes songs in Apple's AAC format.

Carry one of these devices and you've got your favorite photos, music, videos, and recorded TV shows. Music selections show album art (but not lyrics), and photos can be played as a slide show complete with background music. True, you could put some music and photos on a PDA, but few people do. And with a PMC, you've got room for thousands of photos and hundreds of tunes, plus dozens of hours of video. That means you can record Jay Leno's monologue every night to watch on the train the next day; just be sure to set it up as an automatic transfer in a monitored folder. But unfortunately, there's no way to load movies from DVDs (which you've paid for and thought you had ownership of) onto a PMC.

The field is new, and we're not yet declaring an Editors' Choice. Among this first wave of PMCs, the Creative entry is the most polished and has better controls. The iRiver model is easier to hold or place on an airplane tray table. For $50 more ($550 for 20GB), Samsung's smaller size may prove most appealing—if its battery life is competitive. So should you be the first to jump on the bandwagon? There's enough essential usefulness in these generation-one products that you won't kick yourself a year from now for buying early. Portable Media Centers are here, and they're good already—but they're also certain to improve.

Copyright ?? 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.