Mobile Madness

2005-06-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

Personal DVD players, personal MP3 players, digital cameras, mini-dvi cams, PDA's, and laptops, these are all signs of the time. A brisk new world, people on the go, and business that requires conventions, meetings, and a heap of travel expenses. It seems now that we have more junk to tote around than ever before. Backpacks full of entertainment, DivX movies on CD's, MP3's, Music CD's, and good old commercial DVD's. It's about time that someone merges a few of these technologies into something to reduce the clutter of all of those portables. Enter the Zvue.

Nearly all of us have been to some trade show, sat for long periods of time on an airplane en-route to some business meeting, or have been stuck waiting to make that big presentation. To pass the time, we have all of the above mentioned toys from DVD's to MP3's and everything in between. Again, enter the Zvue. This little-known device, powered by a Freescale semiconductor, eliminates several media players and makes Apple's iPod look like an overpriced phonograph. It's time to clean out your briefcase boys and girls, and prepare for the little everything in your palm device, Zvue.

Look around you, visit a trade-show, or show up at the office when the out-of-town crew arrives. What in the world are we doing in the name of portability? A player for each kind of media? We drag out the laptop when we want to show someone a picture we just took on our digital camera? Our totes are filled with CD's and DVD's? Wasn't the point of this stuff to carry less, an be more portable? Oh, and don't forget those DivX files you have that are never used to their true potential. I have several friends that rip DVD's, convert those files to DivX, and all to watch on their desktop computer. This isn't portability; it's insanity. Time to rethink isn't it?

One little device, overlooked time and time again in the portable industry, the Zvue eliminates the need for most of these devices. Using a standard SDCard, the zvue makes the insane sizes the SDCards are available in actually useful. A 1Gig SDCard makes little sense in a digital camera, but if it's holding movies, music, and pictures for your zvue--a heap of things have been eliminated. One handheld device to play them all: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, DivX, JPG, GIF, BMP, and even acts as a USB card reader. *

I'm sorry, Apple, your iPod was yesterday's technology before it was launched. Like the phonographs of yesteryear, it has become eclipsed by current technology. Of coarse, there are other newer things available, like Sony's PSP. Yet, this wonderful new device is like a DVD player that can only play commercial titles. Oh yeah, you know what that feels like don't you? Remember when laptops were made that only read commercially made DVD's? Yuck. While the iPod doesn't have this limitation, it is still limited to one kind of media; therefore, it requires other entertainment devices to take up valuable briefcase-estate. Comparing an iPod and a Zvue is more like comparing a juke-box to a home-entertainment center, except pocket sized. Like I said, overpriced phonograph.

The comparison works, because the Zvue is a pocket home-entertainment center. Music, movies, photographs, and removable media, the Zvue does everything but replace your laptop or PDA. Of coarse, there are limitations, drawbacks, and shortcomings; that is to be expected of any device. There are also several features that I really didn't cover, like two headphone jacks (now there's common sense, if not innovation), a pre-configured version of VirtualDubMOD (PC), links to free movies from their web-site, and the modern day answer to everything: firmware upgrades. As any owner of a Zvue can attest, this is the one pocket device to replace all others. Why carry a personal DVD player, an iPOD, and a USB pen-drive when you board a plane, when you can have it all in just one pocket? The modern portable world doesn't need a pile of players to fall out of our briefcases, just more choices like Zvue.

* The card reader firmware still needs some updating, and if there is a major drawback to this device -- it's that the card reader functionality falls short when it comes to large (>512M) sdcards and mmcards.

Eclipsing Stagnation

2005-05-31T01:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Transcending Time & Space, a blog space from Targhan, known for the MorphOS community site - MorphZone, among other projects, websites, and obscure bouts of fantastical writings.

Since this is intended to be a short introduction to the space, I'll keep it short. The content I intend to post is likely to be a disjointed collection of topics, but with an emphasis on MorphOS, the Pegasos, and life with alternative computing.