Digital domains

Today's digital consumer goes through life accumulating multimedia assets: batches of megapixel photos, bunches of MP3 files, and bushels of downloaded video clips. He or she longs for a convenient way to transport this precious trove, access it for entertainment, share it with others, and expand it through ongoing acquisition.

Those are the assumptions behind an emerging type of portable entertainment gadget that combines a voluminous hard disk with an LCD and AV connectivity. I set out to examine some of these new products—variously known as digital/multimedia wallets or jukeboxes—to see how they're taking shape. Do they deliver appealing abilities? Or might they represent wishful thinking on the part of manufacturers?

I tried two products: SmartDisk's FlashTrax and Archos's AV320 Video Recorder. (I hope to obtain more examples in the near future, so please stay tuned to the Digital Den e-mail newsletter.) Both devices let you enjoy photos, audio, and video, either on the device itself or by connecting it to a TV and/or stereo. And both products attach to a PC via USB, providing simple drive-letter access. However, the two products differ in significant ways.

I put the FlashTrax through its paces first. The unit, which retails for $499, contains a 30-Gbyte hard disk, has a 3.5-in. TFT screen, and sports a CompactFlash slot on its front edge (Picture). The latter feature tips you off to the product's main intended use: offloading photos from digital cameras in the field. This application seems to have the makings of a minor killer app, as digital photographers discover that even large flash-memory cards fill up quickly.

The FlashTrax excels at the photo-offload function. I took about 15 pictures with my 2-megapixel camera, put the CompactFlash card in the powered-down FlashTrax device, and pushed the "copy" button located next to the CompactFlash slot. The machine came to life and sucked up the pictures in about 45 seconds, placing them in a folder named with that day's date.

Once that was done, I was able to view the photos on the LCD, rotate them with a single button press, zoom in and out, and even initiate a slide show. I found the LCD's image quality to be decent, although it suffers from a degree of graininess. Hooking the device up to my television yielded better results, with rich colors and no flicker.

After a minor snafu with driver installation on my Win98SE PC (fixed by a quick trip to the SmartDisk Web site), the FlashTrax appeared as my "H" drive when connected by USB, and I uploaded my pictures to the PC in a flash.

Unfortunately, the FlashTrax has some drawbacks. It's not the prettiest device, the user-interface is a bit clunky, and the unit responds to commands rather sluggishly. Worst of all, SmartDisk clearly bit off more than it could chew when it decided to include MP3 playback. The device delivers anemic volume and exhibits unacceptable distortion at moderate volume levels. Moreover, the player doesn't display ID3 tag information and—incredibly—has to stop playing before it will allow you to access and change bass and treble settings.

Feeling somewhat disappointed, I turned to the Archos AV320, which aspires to be a do-everything digital companion (Picture). In addition to acting as a media player and an external hard disk, the device can record audio in MP3 format and video in MPEG-4—the latter courtesy of an add-on accessory Archos includes in the retail box. In addition to this video-recorder module, Archos also sells a 3.3-megapixel camera, flash-memory-card readers, and an FM receiver, all of which plug into the unit's left edge.

Archos didn't provide the CompactFlash reader I requested, so I can't directly compare the AV320's photo-offloading performance to that of the FlashTrax. But based on my overall experience with the device, I'm confident I would have been pleased.

For starters, the AV320's 3.8-in. QVGA LCD is simply gorgeous. In addition, the user-interface is both elegant and robust. The device features a miniature joystick, "enter" and "escape" buttons, and a cleverly designed set of three differently shaped function buttons. Context-sensitive graphics along the bottom of the screen tell you what function each of these three buttons will perform at any given moment. The system took only a minute to grasp and proved to be both painless and powerful after that.

Actually, the AV320 exceeded my expectations in just about every way. As an MP3 player, the device delivers clean sound and plenty of volume, displays ID3 information, and offers a decent set of sound-shaping controls—which you can access while the music is playing. When I viewed a preinstalled DivX-format film clip, the LCD's output could have been mistaken for a DVD, and the sound, through headphones, was similarly impressive.

Connecting the device's audio-out port to my stereo's inputs delivered excellent sound to my living room. And the video-out provided a stable picture to my TV, although the larger screen tended to reveal minor compression artifacts in the DivX clips I viewed.

Next, I slipped the video-recorder module into the AV320 and rewired the setup so that my VCR was feeding the device's video and audio inputs. Then I put a tape in the VCR, pushed "play," and hit "record" on the AV320. The resulting MPEG-4-based AVI file looks decent on the AV320 but painfully pixelated on the larger TV screen. The audio sounds great, but there's a slight sync problem between the audio and video. Still, for real-time capture by a mobile device, it's not bad.

I also connected the device to my stereo, recorded audio clips directly to MP3, and found the results acceptable.

Best of all, the AV320 makes all of these functions and their many optional settings so simple to explore and tweak that I didn't even crack open the manual.

Needless to say, all of this comes at a price. The 20-Gbyte model I used lists for $599.95 (including the video-recorder module). The company also offers a 40-Gbyte model, the AV340, for $629.95.

As the AV320 shows, it's possible to create a product that does almost anything a multimedia aficionado might desire. Yet one still has to wonder about the prospects for these devices.

They're on the pricey side. Their target buyers are likely to own PCs and other gadgets already. And notebook PCs can do everything they can do—and much more—while offering similar portability and larger screens.

In the end, it's anybody's guess whether digital consumers will consider these products essential. We'll be watching.

Author Information

You can reach Special Projects Editor Matthew Miller at 1-617-558-4714, fax 1-617-558-4470, e-mail mdmiller@reedbusiness.com.