Of course, we brought you the news on i-Bead's 600-series a while ago, but now it's official: the i-Bead 600 was rewarded its own official product page. Looking good as ever, the 600 offers some reasonably interesting features. First and most ridiculous of which has got to be the Silver Nano coating-thing. I quote: "Silver nano (Ag+) naturally kills 99.9% of harmful bacteria like ‘Escherichia coli’ and ‘Yellow Staphylococcus aureus’. It also has effectively antibacterial, disinfectant and deodorizing function. Conform to the age of well-being, i-BEAD truly considers customers’ health. Therefore we released the very first mp3 player ,i-BEAD600, applied Silver(Ag+) Nano Health System all over the world. Slim and light design makes your indoor and outdoor life more comfortable."

"Yellow Staphylococcus aureus", sounds scary enough. It's the stuff that makes nasal pus look all greenish (huh? yellow makes stuff look like it's green? I'm puzzeled), if you're interested. And we know you are - stop picking your nose, or buy that i-Bead 600.

We're wondering if it'll kill musquitos too - if so, make that order a double one. We can but hope and wait for the flesh-eating-bacteria-killing i-Bead 600 Super-X, of course. Meanwhile, 'Listeria monocytogenes'-resistance isn't mentioned in the specs. maybe they'll take care of that through a firmware upgrade.


Ehm. Ok, sorry for that slight intermezzo. Moving on to the "real" specifications now: it seems that the company has dropped the dual-battery concept - there's an ordinary built-in li-polymer battery in there. Provides some 20 hours of playback time, which isn't bad. Also supports MP3/WMA/ASF/WAV/OGG playback and it has a built-in FM tuner, voice recorder and line-in encoder. Funny thing is that you can actually voicerecord while recording from FM tuner or encoding via line-in. That's gonna be a hit among the karaoke-fans, right?

The 600's text viewer, visualization options (frequency spectrum, volume meter), digital clock, alarm, time-set recording and stop watch add to the whole "wow-this-thing's-actually-pretty-feature-laden" feeling. Of course, the unit's USB2.0-compatible, supports UMS & folder browsing while measuring 80 x 27 x 14.7mm and weighing 33 grams. The simple-profile graphic 128x64 pixel LCD looks ok enough and there's a silver-edged edition available, next to the standard black one. Price was said to be some 130 Euros for the 512MB version, but that' hasn't been verified or anything.

LINK