WinInfo Short Takes: Week of January 12 (CES 2004 edition)
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Portable Media Center devices will blow you away
This week at CES, I spent some time with three Portable Media Center devices (from Creative, iRiver, and Samsung) and ... wow. These devices are going to blow you away. Expect prices in the $400 to $600 range, 20GB to 40GB hard disks, and 3 hours of battery life when watching video (the battery life jumps to 12 hours when listening to audio).
Microsoft: WMA is kicking butt
Microsoft announced at CES that its WMA format is now supported on more than 500 devices, including portable music players, DVD players, personal video recorders, and amplifiers. Furthermore, the company notes, the installed base of portable media players that support Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) platform now numbers more than 4 million--more than twice the number of iPods, which use a competing DRM scheme.