Wall Street’s Walt Mossberg likes the wireless Gemlin music player. The new $299 Gremlin music player has built-in Wi-Fi, so it can download songs from an accompanying subscription service directly, without requiring the use of a personal computer or can transfer music from a PC to the device.
The Gremlin won’t work with some commercial Wi-Fi hot spots, which require a Web browser to connect. But it comes with the built-in ability to connect to T-Mobile’s large network of Wi-Fi hot spots, if you have a T-Mobile account and enter your account information into the Gremlin.
The user interface is much clumsier than an iPod’s. This is partly because there are more functions, like downloading, and the community-sharing capabilities. But some things aren’t well thought out.
For instance, it’s not obvious how you get the song-playing display, which shows the album cover, to stay on-screen for more than a few seconds.
It can’t display photos or videos but can play back podcasts or audiobooks, although no podcasts and only a few audiobooks are yet available on the MusicGremlin service. It includes an FM radio, which the iPod lacks. Gizmodo and WiFiNetNews have more.
Zing is planning a similar player, complete with music infrastructure. The Zing reference player has both a built-in speaker and a microphone, which, combined with the Wi-Fi radio, means it has all the hardware a voice-communication platform needs. It can also stream music via Sirius WiFi.
In related news, ezGear’s ezVision Video iWear ($399), allows you to watch video podcasts, movies, music videos, and TV shows with your 5g video iPod, DVD player or other video devices.
The device simulates widescreen TV with dual video screens, built-in stereo earbuds and a rechargeable battery with up to 8 hours of battery life. It also works with your XBox, Playstation, or Gamecube.
[...] How a simple portable media player evolves into a computing platform on-the-go … I had no idea how useful a tiny, sleek media player can be until I started to try my iPod nano. I can listen to my favorite Chinese and English TV shows (they come as mp3 files) while running on a treadmill or hiking. I can also play games on it while waiting in the mall. I may be able to read books with it as well. Of course, there are a lot more things you can do with such a device (Current iPod and Zune can do some of them): See and listen to (over the music) information such as time, distance, calories burned and pace while running with a sensor receiver attached to the device and transmitter in your Nike sneakers. Easily share your stuff such as photos, music, txt, videos, etc, on the device with others in a conference or a party – without using a computer. Stream content from your device to a LCD monitor, a TV, or another device wirelessly. Surf the web. Read emails. RSS feed. If you add “make phone calls” into the list, this is like the feature list of a future smart phone, right? Apparently, the market is not yet ready for this kind of all-in-one gadgets because of the form factor, power consumption, etc. But imagine if your iPod or Zune is your (i)Phone, at the same screen size, roughly the same weight, always-on connectivity of WiFi or cellular. Anyone who can make this device affordable to most consumers will win. Update: There are a bunch of music players with built-in WiFi. Music Gremlin has been covered by Business 2.0 last month. Here is a summary of these products. The challenge here is to offer WiFi access to *any* wireless LANs yet providing a simple user interface. Home wifi is fine with pre-configured user credentials; commercial hotspots are mostly doing browser hijacking, so the authentication must go through a login web page, which is not possible with music players like these. Also, it would be nice to have wireless ad hoc capability. Users can easily setup and/or associate with an ad hoc network, sharing files, etc. Published Friday, October 27, 2006 7:53 PM by zhengpei Filed under: Mobile Landscape [...]
Left by Mobile Computing and Technologies : How a simple portable media player evolves into a computing platform on-the-go ... on October 30th, 2006