As many people here know already, mintpass is a company that was created by iriver's former CEO Yang, Duk-Jun. He was disappointed with the progress of iriver; although it's one of the biggest Korean DAP companies; so decided to start a new company based on networking. The mintpass mintpad has been available in Korea for nearly half a year now but will be invading international markets in a few months time. I'm feeling alot of deja vu, since iriver started selling internationally in the same way. The pricing for the mintpad will be around $150 so is a pretty nice deal for a device that's quite capable. I've actually had about a week of play time with the device, so I'm pretty confident with this device - and therefore organized the key features here in anticipation of the release.



Memo
The mintpad is the first device from mintpass. A cellphone is supposed to come after this device, but only time will tell. As the name suggests, the device is centered around a note pad concept. The 2.9" pressure sensitive display has been tweaked to perfection for making notes and doodling. Although it doesn't feel like a huge feature, I realized how often I would use this feature after playing with the mintpad. The mintpad also lets you make notes on the pictures that you take with the built in 1.3MP camera which is a nice addition. The device also has a built in accelerometer, so you can save your memo by shaking the device.

Mintchat
The mintpad is a very social device so a chatting feature is an obvious addition. The mintpad allows you to send memos to other mintpads using a AD-HOC connection. Chatting via Wi-Fi isn't available yet but would be quite a nice addition.

Mintlife/Mintblog
Mintlife is one of the coolest features on a DAP I have ever seen. Mintlife is a service where mintpass sends you a mission on a regular basis. The one that's open right now is, "I'm so cool when...". Your mission is to send mintpass a photo/memo in response to the question. Mintpass then selects the best entries (around 10) and rewards them another mintpad, box of goodies, or sometimes even money. Mintblog is blogging via your mintpad. You can send photos/memos from your mintpad and they will be uploaded to your blog at mintpass's website. The cool thing is that you can comment via your own device using memos to other people's blog posts.

Wi-Fi
The thing that ties all the features of the mintpad together is Wi-Fi. It's what makes all the social aspects fo the mintpass possible. The device offers a fluid web browsing experience and has been tested to be much more speedy than that of the iPod touch - although the smaller display doesn't favor the mintpad.



Hot
All of the things above are positive features, but there are more things that make the mintpad - and mintpass brilliant. According to various reviews, the mintpad is supposed to sound spectacular. They say that the sound is much richer and smooth than that of modern iriver devices. The mintpass also offers a bookstore that provides a social ebook experience. And lastly, the mintpass has received even more firmware (called funware in mintpass) upgrades than the Samsung P2. The mintpass team is continuing to add features and perfect the device. And oh ya, did I mention that the mintpad has a removable battery?



Not
Ofcourse, the mintpad is not perfect. There are some huge issues with it. First of all, the device comes in only 4GB wiith a microSD slot. Also, the display is miserable to beautiful displays on the Cowon S9 or Samsung P3. The fact that it's not wide screen doesn't help either. The device is also kinda fat by today's standards and runs on Windows CE.




SPECS
CPU: ARM9 400Mhz
display: 2.9" TFT LCD @ 262000 colors
memory: 4GB (w/ MicroSD (up to 16GB))
wireless LAN: 802.11b/g
camera: 1.3MP
speaker: mono
size: 78.2 X 63.8 X 15.2mm @ 90g
battery life: 30hr music / 5hr video

OS: winCE 5.0 professional
audio: MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV, APE, FLAC
video: MPEG4, WMV7/8/9, MPEG1/2

mintpass Korea webiste