The popularity of portable gadgets is sky rocketing. Wireless Internet access (WiFi) has increased its area of coverage. The portable gadgets are becoming even handier with this development. Portable gadgets include portable media players, laptops, the Ultra Mobile PC or netbooks. Contents can now be easily downloaded from the Internet. VCD or DVD movies, for instance, can be easily converted into digital formats with special software. Portable devices have become a part of work and lifestyle, and a personal travel companion. Portable devices include portable video players, digital audio players, personal digital assistant and digital video recorders.
The portable media player is also an electronic gadget that plays digital media which it stores. Basically it is a portable audio player with the added facility of displaying images and playing videos. Mobile phones which can also store and play audio files, and display images and play videos are also categorized as portable media player. Archos, a portable media player, was the first one of its kind to be successfully marketed in 2002. Most of the portable media players have MP3 audio format while some also support other formats such as WAV, Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC).
OELD or LCD is usually used to display images. With the help of accessories, some of these players can also record video. JPEG format for display of images is used in all the players. File formats including PNG, TIFF and GIF are compatible with some players like the iPod series. MPEG-4 video format is supported by most of the players. Some others support the AVI and Windows Media Video (WMV). Transfer of files between the computer and players is possible with most players. These portable devices are manufactured and marketed by many electronic firms. For instance a French company, Archos, offers portable video players, digital audio players, personal digital assistant and digital video recorders. Archos released its Generation 5 series of portable media players in 2007. The series included Archos 705 WiFi 160GB.
The hard drive, flash memory or microdrive stores the data. Storage capacities have reached 32 GB for flash memory based PMPs and 320 GB for the hard drive PMPs. The PMPs storage capacity can be expanded and contents can be directly transferred from external devices with memory Sticks, Secure Digital card and CompactFlash. This provision is available in a number of players. The size of the screen ranges up to 7 inches. Resolutions too vary and go up to WVGA. The color depth is 16-bit but could reach 24-bit in some players. Touch screens are introduced and PMPs are increasingly coming out with this feature. Other features that have been introduced in recent years are a simple camera, text readers, editors and game emulation.
Media players have indeed underwent through a major transformation. People no longer watch movies at cinemas or at home because PMPs have changed people’s lifestyles.
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