i grouse about media players a helluva lot, but i hate just complaining and not offering something better. To be honest, i'd love to combine the best aspects of my three players i most respect (yes, the iPod is one of those) into one device. And this would be it:
Features:
- Audio: MP3, OGG, WMA, AA
- Video: QVGA AVI/MPG (15+ FPS)
- FM Radio
- Line in Audio recording
- Text notes with minimal HTML formatting support. (<b><a>and the color attribute at the least)
- vCard/vCal based contacts/calendar support
- Switchable UMS/MTP support
- Combination Audio/Video output (just like on your camcorder)
- Consumer replaceable battery
Things to note:
- There's no proprietary connector. It uses completely standard stuff. If you need a cable, you can buy it today at Walgreens.
- It uses open specifications (well, except for the DRM junk, but that's easy to get.) It looks like a drive with special directories because that's exactly what it is. Photos are stored into "collections" that are sub-directories. One of those collections is the album art, which are pictures that have the same name as the artist+album you want associated with it. (e.g. Art of Noise+Best of.jpg, Boston+Best of Boston.jpg, etc.) Yeah, there's a semi-arbitrary cut off for artist and title names to prevent Pawning, (say 15 characters each) and bands that name themselves "/.* and the (:";)'s" are screwed, but hey.
- The expansion slot is for a memory upgrade. Consumers will run out of space. Memory is cheap. Plus if they decide to do something really wacky, this gives them a way to do it.
- Notes can link to anything. Videos, individual photos, other notes, calendar events, contacts, you name it. Likewise, calendar events and contacts can link back to notes.
- It uses some existing platform so folks can add programs to it. It could be FlashLite, WinCE, Mozilla, Perl, i don't care. This is a platform in your pocket. Your best asset and biggest market are people doing unexpected things with this.
- It's got a lot of features, but is missing some. (e.g. high frame rate video replay, video recording, wifi, etc.) i don't think you really need that stuff, and they only eat your battery anyway. Most of the time, you just want this to last a week on a single charge.
- i've kinda not talked about size and weight. Ideally "shirt pocket small" is best and just heavy enough that you know which pocket it's in. That's good because it reduces the chance of it winding up in the wash.
- Because it can act as a USB drive, folks on any platform that can do USB can use it. (Yeah, they may not get to do the Janus DRM stuff unless they use some protected MTP mode, but that has already been solved)
Ok, so that's my dream media player. i'd appreciate it if someone were to whip one of these up over the holiday break. What would be yours?
I'd change the card socket to a pair of those funky hybrid slots so it can eat just about any kind of card, and add DNG file display. Then I can carry it with my digital camera on vacation and use it to backup the photos I take.
I might want to hang an iPod connector on there, just to take advantage of all the cool accessories, but I could be talked out of that.
I'm not horribly particular about drive vs. flash, other than you get significantly more battery life out of a flash based one, but drives are far cheaper. I suppose if I really wanted to go crazy, i'd make that slot for CF2 so you could attach one of those 8GB microdrives.
I could see multiple versions of this thing though. One high end version that has all the candy (and requisite size) and other more main stream versions that don't.
Oh, and Dave, that's the nice thing about having this be a base, known platform. You can add in programs to do whatever you want. As for the iPod connector, I still think there's a definite industry for iPod to usb/audio/component video dongle out there. Heck, I don't care about not being able to control my music player from my steering wheel (although the idea of driving in a circle for a few minutes as you scan down your playlist is oddly appealing to me) I just want to plug in whatever player I have and listen.
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I assume from the expansion slot that this is a flash memory player. That's OK. I'd love it if the slot can also be used as a loading (and copying) slot. So that I could share music. But, even better, how about some wifi connectivity (like the Zune)? Not to "share" music in the way that MS deems, but more to be a portable wifi broadcast station/receiver. So that you can broadcast your tunes to others. They can listen, but not copy your music via wifi.
Also, what about some FLAC support for us particular people who have golden hearing? Although, I guess as a flash memory player, that would kind of suck. Maybe a harddrive version would be nice to.
And for crying out loud, where's the AM radio? Some of us actually like talk radio and news…
Hurry up JR. Build this device.
Thanks.
I'll be expecting it by Christmas time.