Well it happened to very little surprise, but Apple has officially announced the iPod with Video. It’s the same height and width as the current 4th gen iPods, but just a tad bit thinner which makes sense considering the shrinking density of mini-harddrives. The screen has a 320×240 pixel resolution, 2.5-inches in size and 260k color display. The new iPod offers over 20 hours of battery life and supports playback of H.264 and MPEG4 formats at 30fps.
It will come out in two versions: 30GB and 60GB. Prices are $299 for the 30GB and $399 for the 60GB version which holds 150 hours of video. They are planning to ship both in one week (*cough*).
The Swanni has some predictions for 2006. Who is the Swanni? Hell if I know, but maybe we should listen to him.
- DirectTV will emerge as the HDTV leader.
- Several more HDTV networks will launch in 2006.
- New HDTV DVD players will be the buzz of the industry.
- HDTV sales will jump in the first two months of 2006.
- The Multicasting movement will be slowed in 2006.
- HDTVs in hotel rooms will encourage more sets for their homes.
- The Plasma-LCD-DLP flat-screen TV war will spur more interest in HDTV.
9rules Member Konstantinos Christidis has posted a review of the iRiver U10 Portable Media Player.
Overall, this is a great and (relatively) powerful device but what kills it is the high price tag. 1GB costs $249, this is what a 4GB Nano costs (never mind the fact that it doesn’t play videos). Maybe they should start working on a micro-HDD based device? I could see myself paying the same amount for 4 gigs of storage, even if it meant slightly larger dimensions and a possibly smaller battery life (28 hours are high enough so that a small reduction wouldn’t hurt anyone); both of which are to be expected when going from Flash memory chips to hard drives.
Audioholics has a review up of the InFocus ScreenPlay 5000 Projector. They give it some solid ratings and consider to be “a torch”. While I can’t be too sure if you can judge a projector on the images posted on a website (too many factors at play) it does seem to offer decent picture quality.