MobiBlu is cooking up an interesting new device that they're calling the BOXON. Little is know about this thing yet - at least, among those of us who can't decipher Korean. All I can figure out from this page of strange scribblings and wonderful pictures is that it has a 1.7-inch OLED screen, comes with 256mb of flash memory, has an FM radio, and plays MP3s. It also has some kind of voice-over-iP function and a dictionary mode... although how these are implemented is kind of a puzzle. Could be just a couple of PC applications that come pre-loaded in memory.

The layout of the controls is rather unusual, with half of them being stuck on the backside. The player does appear to be pretty small and with the screen taking up most of the face, perhaps it was as good a place to put them as any. You'd probably remember what each of them do by feel after awhile, but I imagine it would be a bit chaotic at first.

Earlier this month, AVING.net had a short article about the BOXON, stating that it supports ebooks (text reading), video playback, image display, and has an English-Korean dictionay. Supposedly, it's due out this month in Korea, although it has yet to appear on MobiBlu's website.

More pics HERE.