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Zen Portable Media Center

A Reuters article pointed me to Amazon taking $499 pre-orders for Creative's 20Gb portable media center device. The portable device will play Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Image, MP3, JPEG, and TIFF files. It'll sync with a computer running any version of XP, but if you've got Media Center Edition running, you'll be able to transfer shows directly over to the portable device.

This new Creative unit is the first product that MS hinted at early this year. It'll be interesting to see how well it does in the marketplace. The price is kind of high and since you're locked into using Windows Media Video instead of Microsoft's own AVI, DivX, and/or MPEG, I'm curious if there are enough legitimate users of wmv to create a market for this. I bet if the device played more video and audio formats (why not add ogg support?), they'd sell more.

by Matt Haughey July 9, 2004 in News

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