John Gillooly finds the secret to inner video peace.
It's designed as a portable video player, and to work best when combined with a media center PC. It uses a similar interface to MCE and is designed to be navigated with a minimum of control and maximum ease; a simple console styled joypad in this case.
In order to get media onto the device you need Windows Media Player 10. When you drag over an 'unsupported' format like DivX or XviD Media Player 10 converts the file to Windows Media Video in a format suitable for display on the small screen. This takes some time to do, but the end result is video that looks mighty nice. This is one fiddly part of the DRM built into the PMC devices, but it caused only minor inconvenience.
It also supports television recorded by MCE systems as well as images and audio. There is support for TV out, but the unfortunate side effect of formatting video for the small screen is that it generally looks quite crappy when shown on a larger display. TV out is perfectly adequate for doing slideshows though, and it could have been further enhanced with the inclusion of visualisations to go with the audio.
With decent battery life (Creative quote seven hours for video) and without the restrictions on content that seem to be unfortunately destined to plague Sony's PlayStation portable (which is probably PMCs greatest potential competitor unless Apple gets off its butt and releases a video iPod) this is a handy unit. It is costly and somewhat bulky but in terms of sheer cool factor few things come close, and the thought of using it while travelling is almost enough to cut through the cost factor.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012