Consumer Electronics Show 2004 Day 3 - And now, the rest of the story

Portable Media Center Devices

These days the fine line between consumer electronics and PCs is slowly being blurred; the whole point behind Windows XP Media Center Edition OS, which helps being the PC into the living room/home theater environment. At CES, Microsoft has announced a new type of MCE device, one quite different than the MCE PCs that we have been seeing to date. The new MCE devices that Microsoft has been touting are of the handheld variety, resembling something like a miniaturized Sega GameGear. These portable media center edition devices are able to perform similar functions as their desktop big brothers just on the go. Pictures from your camera can be viewed, FM/AM radio access, video playback, watch recorded TV content, with certain limitations naturally. Video, however, must be in the WMV format. From what we understand, the same file format used to record TV content in Microsoft Media Center Edition OS is likely going to be supported.

So far, we have learned that these devices will likely start off with a 20GB mini hard drive and then scale up. The samples we have seen thus far are from Creative and FIC, and both are very much in the development stages. Instead of running an embedded solution of Windows XP, these devices are running Windows Mobile 2003 with the MCE software module. There seems to be some requirement in terms of the buttons a home button, fast forward button, rewind button, play/pause button, and quad-directional pad. As far as hardware requirements, there aren't any that we are aware of other than the CPU and LCD. All of the samples seem all be using Intel's Xscale processors, which are also used in PDAs.

There are still several issues to be worked out, such as the UI interface, which lack radio functionality. Since these are engineering samples, several things such as stretching the UI and enabling radio functionality are going to be worked out by system designers.

Creative's solution interfaces via USB, while FIC also provides Firewire support. The difference in the FIC solution is that they are using the mini USB and Firewire ports to conserve space, this means while space is saved that special cable needs to be used. Creative's full size USB port implementation makes it easier to pass between multiple systems easily with any USB cable.

At FIC, there are options available to ODM customers, who may prefer to sell their Portable Media Center devices with a different design other than the one used by Creative or FIC.

The portable Media Center devices will retail starting at $499 and going up to $700+ at their release later this year.