Filed under: Digital Cameras, Portable Audio, Portable Video

You’d think that we would have heard of a company that’s made (or perhaps rebadged) literally hundreds of DAPs and PMPs since 2004, but until we came across the swivel-screen M790, we’d never caught wind of a Chinese manufacturer called Newman. Most of its products are simply cookie-cutter devices that resemble so many of the other products we’ve featured on these pages, but the M790′s unique design and large-ish 2.5-inch screen convinced us to give it another look. As with many foreign products of its ilk, this DAP’s exact specs are a little hard to come by, but we do know that it sports a QVGA resolution, built-in speakers, a camera of some undetermined pixel count (machine translation pegs it as a 20 megapixel shooter, but frankly we’re a bit suspect), and support for MP3, WMA, JPEG, and unspecified video files. Storage on this one is a paltry 512MB (expandable through the SD / MMC slot), but that’s just as well, as it’ll take a pretty long time to load up even that amount of data over the sluggish USB 1.1 connection. Also along for the ride are your typical assortment of dictionaries, games, voice recording, audio line-in, and the all important timekeeping functionality. It seems like you can pick up the M790 sometime this month (maybe even right now!), but it’s obviously not available in the US, so factor in the cost of a plane ticket to China along with however many yuan this happens to be retailing for.

[Via Anything But iPod]

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Filed under: GPS, Portable Audio, Portable Video

hspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.engadget.com/media/2006/04/sorell.jpg" />

We haven’t
featured a foreign PMP on these pages in awhile, so for those of you
hungry for a feature-filled device that you’ll never get your hands on, we proudly present the Sorell DN10. With only
1GB of internal flash memory, the DN10 isn’t going to win any capacity awards, although an SD card slot allows you to
jack that total up to a still-low-but-acceptable 3GB. Features, then, and not storage, are what should draw Koreans to
this model, as it boasts a 3.5-inch screen and both a GPS receiver for navigation and DMB tuner for watching OTA
programming when they get sick of the two movies that they were able to cram onto the device. Filetypes supported
include AVI, DivX, XviD, WMA, MP3, and JPEG, and pricing comes in at under $400 (measured in won, of course).

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Filed under: Digital Cameras

href="http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7BF38B6A1D-363A-4642-9610-5EB71DEA4B6F%7D&keyword="> vspace="16" hspace="4" border="0" align="right" alt="" src="http://www.engadget.com/media/2006/04/patent.jpg" />It’s
been a mixed day over at Philips: on the one hand, they had the pleasure of announcing a new offspring, href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/19/philips-spins-off-liquavista-to-develop-thin-electrowetting-disp/">Liquavista,
but now they’ve been forced to air some dirty laundry concerning fellow consumer electronics manufacturer Kodak, taking
the NY-based company to court for allegedly infringing upon a sixteen-year-old patent. Philips claims that while
several digital camera manufacturers license the JPEG compression technology protected by patent number href="http://tinyurl.com/q6bk3">4,901,075 (refer to the schematic above for all of the technical details), Kodak
refuses to do so, even though many of their products supposedly take advantage of the "Huffman codeword"
magic outlined within. Financial details of the suit have not been made public, but Kodak doesn’t sound like it’s going
to budge, saying that it will defend itself "vigorously."

[Via href="http://today.reuters.com/business/newsarticle.aspx?type=consumerProducts&storyID=nN19246085&imageid=&cap=">Reuters]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

It's hitting our shores a little later than expected, but you can finally queue up for the US version of Samsung's hot little YM-PD1 personal media player (pictured), the YM-P1 (the absence of the "D" refers to the lack of a DMB over-the-air DTV receiver). Since we've been following this model for some time, you'll no doubt recall that it features a 4-inch widescreen TFT display, sports in-line recording to a 20GB hard drive, and supports a gaggle of formats including MP3, WMA, OGG, AC3, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, AVI, WMV, JPEG, and BMP. You can also jack up the memory a bit via the SDIO slot, listen to and record FM radio, and even play some videogames (although the controls don't look all that well-suited for serious gaming). SamsungHQ spotted the P1 available for pre-order on Datavision's website at $370 (where "Our prices are too low to advertise!"), although there is no mention of when the devices will actually be shipping, so don't toss your Archos aside just yet.