We never heard of a company called "Nainworks", which kind of surprised us since they did have something interesting to show: the so-called "UMI". Now you might want to know what that actually stands for... err.. well, it's supposed to mean "Ubiquitous Multimedia Informator". Yeah. Would you mind if we'll just call it "UMI" anyway? It's some kind of a portable multimedia player which supposedly can be hooked up to a DMB receiver. You don't have to, though - unlike many of these random Korean DMB thingies, the UMI doesn't come with a built-in huge antenna.

Let's start with the good part - some nice little specs. The UMI supports MPEG1, MPEG4 SP, XviD, DivX3/4/5 + SMI video-wise and MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, AC3 +WAV audio-wise. Of course there's a TV-out on there as well (PAL + NTSC) and the 5-hour battery life for video is neither bad nor impressive (10 hour for audio is somewhat weak'ish) but at least it comes with a user-removable power source.


A 20GB hard drive will allow us to store all kinds of data (USB2.0 UMS compatible), whereas there's a 4-inch, 16 million color, 480x272 pixel widescreen display to be found under the flip-top hood. The GUI looks kind of bland, but one could also regard it as being "clean". All in all, it's not the most compact PMP ever but it does a good job at looking slender and non-brick like.

Here's something unique though: the really bad thing about this player is not the actual hardware itself. It's not about the firmware either (as far as we could tell in 5 minutes time). No, Nainworks should just really consider hiring a decent advertising company. Their current brochure is an absolute disaster at certain paragraphs. I won't claim that my English writing is super-awesome or anything, but with a little imagination you could at least make a little sense out of it. This brochure just had us puzzled, really. A few examples:


Errr... Ok. Glad we got that out of the way.