I’ve seen some stylish players in my day, but the XO from Newsmy takes the cake. With its completely mirrored finish, it looks more like an accessory in a cosmetics bag, than an MP3 player. It’s also incredibly thin, at just 5.5mm’s. The XO has a 1.5″ OLED screen and what appear to be touch-sensitive controls. It isn’t all eye candy either; The XO supports MP3, WMA, FLAC, APE, and AVI files. It also has an FM tuner, Voice recorder, and an e-book reader built-in.
The XO has to be the shiniest player I’ve seen, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Even Apple wised up and removed the shiny backing from their iPods. The XO is bound to be scratch and fingerprint magnet when it gets released later this Spring. Pricing and capacity info have yet to be released, but we’ll pass it along when we get it.
Whenever a classic movie gets remade, many of us just accept the fact that Hollywood has run out of ideas. Well, it looks like the same can be said about Creative, a company that clearly isn’t living up to their name of late. Instead of announcing a new touchscreen player, like most other DAP companies; they announce the player you see below. No your eyes aren’t deceiving you, the ZEN MX is rehash of the ZEN from 2007. The player looks identical to the original, save for the power switch being removed, and integrated with the Play/Pause button.
Like most of those Hollywood remakes, the ZEN MX takes a big step backwards from the original. First, it removes support for AAC files, leaving you with just MP3, and WMA. You can also say goodbye to WMV, Xvid, and Divx support on the video side. In its place is a proprietary CMV format. To top it off, it looks like Creative still hasn’t fixed the SD-card integration issue, despite having years to do so.
Is it me, or does Creative have a death wish? The only silver lining, if you can call it that, is the pricing. The 8GB model will retail in Japan for 9,800 Yen (around $91US), and the 16GB for 13,800 Yen (~$143US). While I still feel Creative has the potential to make a great player (with the help of their Zii chip), I also feel their best days are long behind them.
We’ve been having really slow news lately, so I decided to post a quick video of the OLED display. The Cowon S9 uses an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display - or more precisely, the Samsung manufactured AMOLED display. OLED displays as we all know consume very little energy, are thin/light, have brilliant image quality and are very rugged. AMOLED’s are pretty much the same, but consume even less energy. There is a disadvantage to this technology however, which is that they perform poorly in direct sunlight. We can say that iriver was the first major company to use this technology with the Clix. Recently we’ve seen the Sony X1000 follow in same path. It seems that OLED displays are still considered a premium, but this will probably change like all technologies.
The video above compares the S9 with the Samsung P2 and iPod touch, showing how TFT displays are just incomparable. Keep in mind that it is widely known that OLED displays look better in person.
Cowown has released a new beta firmware today. The major update is the “matrix browser” and “swing mation” feature, which can be seen in the video above.
New additions: - new “matrix browser” for music navigation - new “swing motion” feature for changing tracks - preview feature for dmb - ability to set notepad drawings as background - new game called “Hunter” that uses the g-sensor - other performance/bug fixes
Cowown has released a new beta firmware today. The major update is the “matrix browser” and “swing mation” feature, which can be seen in the video above.
New additions: - new “matrix browser” for music navigation - new “swing motion” feature for changing tracks - preview feature for dmb - ability to set notepad drawings as background - new game called “Hunter” that uses the g-sensor - other performance/bug fixes
Recently, we saw the Cowon S9 being released in the 32GB version. Samsung likes to be up to date with the competition so it was only obvious for themselves to release a 32GB P3. The 32GB P3 will retail at around the same price as the 32GB S9 at about 389,000KOR (290USD). Release date for international markets not yet revealed.
Recently, we saw the Cowon S9 being released in the 32GB version. Samsung likes to be up to date with the competition so it was only obvious for themselves to release a 32GB P3. The 32GB P3 will retail at around the same price as the 32GB S9 at about 379,000KOR (286USD). Release date for international markets not yet revealed.
There are certain players that you expect to get cloned. Any iPod that gets released will no doubt have some slightly off-kilter twin brother somewhere in China. What amazes me are the obscure knock-offs, like this clone of the Zen Moo from Creative. The original served as a laughing stock for many of us here, so why on earth would any one clone it?
The Brando “USB Moo-Cow” MP3 player blatantly rips off just about every detail of the Zen Moo including the ears that double as controls. Sadly, it might be easier to buy this player then it would to import a Zen Moo from China. It’s also much cheaper at $30 for a 4GB model. Just remember folks, always go with Grade-A Cow DAP’s If you settle for some cheap knock-off you’re bound to get Mad Cow Player’s Disease.
The Chinese market is completely saturated with DAP’s, PMP’s, MP4 players or whatever else you want to call them. It’s really hard for us to keep track of all of them, so we just highlight those that stand out. Take the Cube H100HD for instance. It looks like your average Chinese PMP. It even shares its feature-set with most of the competition, supporting 720P resolution videos in the following formats: MPEG-4, Xvid, AVI, RM, and FLV. What sets it apart is its ability to output video in 1080i. It’s apparently the first player to do so.
The H100HD has a 5.0″ touchscreen display, and has extras like an e-bookr eader, an FM tuner, and flash games support. We don’t have any pricing info yet, but like most other players from China, it should be reasonably priced.
