Filed under: Portable Audio

U.K. record label Hed Kandi is looking to extend its reach from the dance floor to your pocket with its latest offering, a self-branded MP3 player pre-loaded with a few of its own tracks. It’s hard to see anyone but the most devoted fans throwing down the pounds for this one though, with the player demanding quite a premium for otherwise lackluster specs. For £69.99 (just over $130), you’ll get 512MB of built-in memory, an OLED display of unspecified size, voice recorder functionality, and support for MP3s and WMAs (DRM, too), with a promised 12 hours of playback from the rechargeable battery. If that doesn’t dampen your Hed Kandi obsessiveness, you can snag one of these right now.

[Via Shiny Shiny]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Chinese manufacturer Aigo has let loose a new digital audio player in its home country, the Patriot MP-F986. Weighing in at just 1.5 ounces in a pocketable 2.6 x 1.85 x 0.6-inch form, this one’s available in both 512MB and 1GB varieties — each packing a 160 x 128 OLED screen for some pint-sized AVI viewing — and supports MP3, WMA, and OGG files on audio front; you’re also getting voice recording and an FM radio for good measure, because, you know, to be an iPod killa you gotta load up on the bells and whistles. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any word on pricing just yet, though we wouldn’t recommend holding your breath for the F986 to show up on this side of the Pacific.

[Via I4U News]

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SPONSORED BY: BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time.

Filed under: Portable Audio

Japanese manufacturer Sun Connection has emerged from years of painstaking research and design, today announcing its Music+ MP3 player. Unlike some other totally different digital audio players, the Music+ relies on SD/MMC cards for storage (topping out at 2GB) and also seemingly only plays back music according to the file name order. The unit itself measures about an inch and a half square and weighs less than an ounce, with its battery promising some eight hours of continuous playback. Sun Connection’s also managed to keep the price low enough, just 2,980 Yen ($25 US) — of course that also means you’ll have to supply your own SD card.

[Via AV Watch]

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Filed under: Portable Audio

Sanyo’s got a new digital audio player poised to drop on the Japanese market, though it’ll mainly be of interest to folks with a couple of extra SD cards laying around, as the DMP-M400SD contains neither a hard drive nor any flash memory. What you are getting with this latest member of the Diply Music line is a pendant-style device sporting a backlit screen that supports MP3 files as well as WMA tracks with or without DRM. Clearly stressing size over features, the M400SD is pretty lean when it comes to extras; in fact, besides acting as a USB mass storage device, there’s really nothing that makes it stand out from the crowd — especially the rather ho-hum 12-hour battery life. If this still sounds like an attractive option to you, then $60 is all it will take to pick one of these up when they’re released on the first of next month.

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Filed under: Portable Audio

Sporting an iPod isn’t always the care-free, non-stop dance party that Apple’s marketing department would like us to believe. We already knew that the devices could cause accelerated hearing loss, get you mugged on the subway, and take away your free will, and now it seems that the popular DAP may also make you an attractive target for the cruel wrath of Mother Nature. Seventeen-year-old Jason Bunch of Colorado was enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon mowing the lawn this past weekend, when all of a sudden he woke up in bed with burns all over his face, vomiting and bleeding from his ears. Although its not clear whether the iPod he was listening to acted as an antenna for the bolt of lightning that ran through his body, its melted earbuds and a hole in the back of the case would seem to indicate that it did indeed serve as a pathway for the harmful electricity. Not only did Bunch lose hearing in one ear and his sense of equilibrium, but even worse, the incident also forced him to stand up his date for the evening — and we doubt he’ll get another chance with this particular girl after offering such an unbelievable and lame-sounding excuse for his absence.

[Via The Raw Feed]

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Filed under: Portable Audio

Usually when MobiBlu breaks us off with a new DAP, it’s got at least one feature to set it apart from the pack — see the super-small Cube and Cube 2 or seemingly perpetual motion-powered B153 as examples. But if you were looking for the company’s new DAH-2200 to hit the scene as the “world’s biggest/smallest/best something or other,” then you’re in for a disappointment, as this flash-based player’s got nothing that we haven’t seen before. Specifically, its 1GB capacity, 27.5 gram weight, and 13-hour battery life make it neither the smallest, longest-running, nor most capacious model out there, and the tiny 2-color OLED screen isn’t all that impressive either. No word on pricing here, but since it’s likely that the 2200 will never be sold outside of Korea — and it’s not really hot enough to import — you’re probably not all that concerned with such details anyway.

[Via DAPreview]

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Filed under: Portable Audio

DAP manufacturer Transcend has been know to offer some rather unconventional designs over the years — see the T.sonic 310 and 620 for reference — but we’d sure like to know what went on in the focus group that convinced the company to craft their newest player like a sparsely-decorated mint tin. Besides its unusual appearance, though, the T.sonic 530 is almost exactly the same model as the much more traditional-looking 520 we saw earlier this year, sporting 512MB or 1GB of flash memory, tiny OLED display, FM tuner, digital voice recorder, and of course, the on-screen lyrics option that promises to “bring out the pop star in everyone.” The 530 is on the market now — willing and able to assist you in the occasional karoake session — and although exact pricing isn’t known, you’ll probably be able to pick up either capacity for under a hundred bucks.

[Via MobileWhack]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Wireless

There’s a new player in town looking to expose the Music Gremlin to some harsh sunlight, and with Sirius and VoIP capabilities along with the Gremlin-like WiFi and Bluetooth for sharing and downloading, the Zing reference device may prove to be a formidable nemesis for the player we first caught at CES. Cnet was hanging out at the D4 conference today and got to check out the Zing in action, and report that the device will enable third-party content providers to offer convenient PC-less download services, although unfortunately the Sirius-branded version will get its radio content not from satellites or terrestrial repeaters but solely through relatively short-range WLAN connections. Still, the built-in mic means that Zing-based products could potentially incorporate VoIP services as well, which would make them serious contenders for some of the musicphones on the market if not for their limited utility outside the range of a hotspot.

[Via Orbitcast, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

If you like to buy products described by seasoned reviewers as "very good," "great," and "excellent," then you'll certainly want to check out iRiver's 2GB Clix DAP if you're in the market for a player that screams "iDon't." Everyone who's gotten his/her hands on iRiver's rebrand of followup to the U10 seems to be in love with the little thing, citing audio that's both accurate and loud, easy-to-use, intuitive controls and interface, its crisp, clear screen, a plethora of options for photo viewing, and even good video playback despite a maximum of 15fps. Other nice touches include relatively high bit-rate options for in-line, voice, or FM recording, a good selection of digital equalizer presets, and better-than-average earbud headphones included in the box. Out of all the reviews that we've seen, the only major knocks on this $200 player are for its use of MTP (as opposed to UMS) file transfers and its supposedly short battery life (at least compared to the U10), although PCMag managed to squeeze a respectable 27 hours out of their Clix in testing.

Read- PCMag
Read- Anything But iPod
Read- Cnet

Filed under: Portable Audio

XM is firing back against the recording industry’s lawsuit over the Pioneer Inno‘s ability to temporarily store copyrighted material, stating rather boldly in an open letter to its customers that “we will vigorously defend these radios and your right to enjoy them in court and before Congress, and we expect to win.” Claiming that the record labels “don’t get it,” XM argues that consumers have always been free to tape over-the-air content from a variety of sources, provided that they restrict those recordings to personal use. What’s more, the Inno doesn’t even let you transfer recorded content to other devices, and deletes all of your tunes if you drop your XM subscription, so it’s already much more restrictive than the recording devices faced by TV and terrestrial radio broadcasters. Instead of actually expecting XM to pay $150,000 for each song recorded by Inno users (which would probably amount to at least several billion dollars), it’s more likely that the music industry is using this suit to coax XM into joining rival Sirius in coughing up additional licensing fees. Also, a note to XM PR: despite your suggestion that the record labels are attacking sat radio owners at the expense of a war on the “real” pirates, we think that the industry is both well-prepared and well-equipped for a multi-front conflict.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Wearables

Diminutive DAP manufacturer MobiBlu has just released the specs for their latest miniature wonder, the 24 x 24 x 24-millimeter Cube 2, which improves upon its predecessor by letting you view photos on a thumbnail-sized, 64 x 48 pixel OLED display. Unfortunately for our love of machine translation, the Korean Cube 2 website lumped all the specs into an un-translatable image, but the sprinkling of English words indicate that there’s not much more to this model than we already knew. Coming in 512MB and 1GB flavors, the 18-gram player features MP3, WMA, and OGG music file support, direct recording from the FM tuner, crossfading between tracks, USB mass storage capabilities, and the obligatory digital equalizer settings, plus the ability to hang it from your ear. Pricing is set at $154 and $192 for the half- and full-gig versions, respectively, but there’s no word yet on when we’ll be seeing this new model ’round these parts.

[Via DAPreview]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Talk about a convergence device-- not only does NTI Comodo's new NP-950 digital audio player perform the obligatory playback and recording functions, it can even act as a VoIP "handset" or broadcast tunes DJ-style over the Internet when docked in its USB cradle. Being marketed as the "Universal MP3 Player" in conjunction with OpenCast, this model is available in 512MB or 1GB flavors and supports MP3, WMA, ASF, and WAV audio tracks, WMV and AMV video files or JPEG/BMP/GIF photos on its 1.5-inch LCD, as well as English, Korean, Japanese, or Chinese eBooks. We're not really sure exactly who's being targeted with this unit -- whose price and release date are unknown -- since you can't store all that much content on it, and the chat/broadcast features seem more gimmicky than useful.

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

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Cowon’s gotten
some rather mixed reviews in the past for their line of iAudio
DAPs, but the outlook seems mostly positive for the upcoming hard drive-based href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/03/cowons-new-iaudio-6-goes-0-85-inch/">iAudio6, with Anything But iPod
finding very few flaws in the diminutive player’s design, features, or performance. Especially impressive is the
1.3-inch OLED screen, which gets high marks for both color depth and clarity — ABi calls it “simply
brilliant” — and makes watching XviD-encoded movies almost bearable on such a small display. The iAudio6, which
we first spotted at CES, can handle
up to 4GB of MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, or WAV-encoded tracks on its .85-inch drive, but it’s the drive that leads to one of
the few knocks on this model, which is a noticeable lag time between operations. Other nice features include USB host
capability for device-to-device file transfer with other UMS-enabled hardware, software that automatically tags certain
tunes with the corresponding lyrics, line-in and voice recording, and surprisingly powerful output that can drive even
large headphones. If you don’t mind a bit of a delay when recording or changing tracks, or a bit of eye strain when
watching your flicks, then the iAudio6 sounds like it’ll make for a solid purchase whenever it becomes available
Stateside.

[Thanks, James]

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Filed under: Portable Audio

We thought the matter had been resolved earlier today when our President credited the government with developing the technology that led to the iPod-filled world we live in today, but now another claimant has come forward in an attempt to recoup his "rightful share" of a billion dollar DAP market he may have helped create. British inventor and furniture shop manager Kane Kramer is currently consulting lawyers to see what, in any, recourse he has to enforce patents he filed in 1981 for an iPod-like device but which he subsequently lost control of due to reported boardroom coup. The patents, which describe a  three-and-a-half-minute-capacity digital audio player with a screen and central navigation controls, eventually became part of the public domain after Kramer's company dissolved and he was unable to raise the money required for renewing them across 120 countries. Kramer, who is most definitely aware of the riches he lost out on, says that the runaway success of iPods specifically and DAPs in general surely makes him "the world's biggest failure."

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

We see a lot of digital audio players pass through here, but Teclast is one of the first manufacturers we've seen to incorporate a separate processor for audio decoding. Just weeks after we spotted their first so-called "dual core" DAP, the C150, comes another PDA-esque model called the T19, which has the same dedicated Wolfson WM8750 decoding chip as the "C" but adds a 1GB option into the mix. Besides MP3 playback, the "T" features MPEG-1 video support, and sports extras such as an FM tuner, line-in recording and voice recording, along with an eBook reader, dictionary, and calendar. Probably only available in China for the time being, the T19 costs 77 or 90 dollars worth of yuan for the 512MB and 1GB versions, respectively.