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AnchorDesk

John Morris and Josh Taylor
All-in-one craze: New gizmo plays audio and video

John Morris and Josh Taylor
Contributing Editors, AnchorDesk
Friday, May 17, 2002
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If any more companies hop on the all-in-one bandwagon, we might need to upgrade it to an all-in-one freight train. We recently reviewed Sony's CLIE PEG-NR70V, a Palm OS PDA housing a built-in digital camera and audio player. And perhaps you've already seen Panasonic's latest ads, with a vertically challenged spokesman, for the SV-AV10. The gadget offers MPEG-4 and JPEG (still image) recording capabilities, as well as MP3 and MPEG-4 playback (for more, check our colleague David Carnoy's column over at CNET.com).

PoGo's Flipster was the first portable video/audio player to grace our labs. The Flipster looks a lot like a clamshell-style cell phone, and features a 2.5-inch screen, a tiny speaker on top, and an expansion slot on the side for SD and MMC flash-memory cards. Its video playback skills are definitely impressive, albeit a bit limited--it supports only WMV and ASF formats.

The Flipster also displays digital still images and has strong MP3 playback capabilities, ultimately making it a pretty cool overall gadget (and it comes in a less expensive 64MB version). Furthermore, PoGo promises to offer more accessories in the future, such as a digital-camera module, a TV tuner, and wireless connectivity.

And this is just the beginning. Bantam Interactive has plans to add MPEG-4 video playback to its future devices, and Casio will release a digital camera/MP3 player mini-gadget this summer. We expect other consumer electronic companies to get on the train, too.

PoGo! Products Flipster 128MB Multimedia Player
Editors' Rating: 5.8
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Jessica Kashiwabara contributed to this column.

What sort of devices would you like to see rolled into an all-in-one? Cell phone and digital camera? Digital camera and PDA? Something else? TalkBack to us!

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