Player with removable, replaceable hard drive
comment: 2 | Thursday, January 27 (2005) 12:05PM | Posted by
Austin Vaughan
| | We've been looking for something like this for years. Notice, on the back, there's a slot for hard drives. Standard 2.5-inch, laptop hard drives. You can easily swap out the HD to change content. These drives are widely available and relatively cheap these days.
Think about it. While most PMPs come with a 20gb or 40gb drive, when it comes to movies, that ain't so much. A DVD at full-rez is like 5gb, and even when compressed down to TV resolution, you're still looking at hundreds of megs. You won't fit but a couple dozen movies on today's PMPs, much less a good selection of music. If you could tote around a spare drive or two, problem solved.
A player with a slot for 1.8-inch drives would be better (size-wize) but they are harder to find and a good bit more expensive.
Anyway, this particular player, the MP4-010 from Citiwide Technologies, is something you'll only find in Honk Kong so the specifics don't really matter. We're hoping a a more global brand will pick up on the idea, but it's probably not going to happen anytime soon.
There is something like this, the Neuros, which uses a modular hard drive/battery "backpack", but you have to get additional packs from the company, and they're not so cheap. Nor does it play movies. |
Comments: 77
oh my citiwide must have the most annoying website on earth, firecrackers exploding in the menu and no way to turn them off.