Portable Video Players
Apparently I’m supposed to be excited about the Creative Zen Vision, the latest entry into the so-called “oncoming” portable video player market.
A fellow with the handle of “Rom” summed it up best:
Again, I am baffled. Why would anyone want to watch a movie on a 3.7″ screen? Even if you could hook it up to your friend’s big plasma screen, why not just bring the DVD?
Portable music success does not equal portable video success.
This is the question I’ve still yet to see answered. Many of my friends have talked about wanting portable video devices, but I still don’t quite understand why I should want one.
The portable DVD players never really enticed me, the release of the Sony PSP didn’t get me excited about portable video, and this Zen Vision still fails to make me even think this is something I’d want to do.
While many people were extremely excited about PDA’s, their functionality was eventually integrated into phones or gaming devices (much to my dismay). The input just wasn’t good enough to replace paper. I feel like a similar thing may happen for portable video: it’s kind of cool, but watching a video on a tiny screen really isn’t that great. It’s not even something I could do. I use my iPod while walking—it’s difficult to watch a video and walk through crowds of people at the same time.
So yet another portable video player was released and I’m still left wondering why exactly I should want these things. I’m not dismissing the concept entirely—I may be won over someday—but for now, I just don’t get it.
The interface also seems to take quite a bit from the iPod photo (nay iPod with color screen). You can tell it’s not an iPod, though, since they use \ as a path separator—and we all know that \ means “escape”, not “folder”. :)
I really want one for my frequent flights. I dislike pulling out my laptop and plopping it on the fold-out table. I usually don’t have enough battery power and it takes a lot of time to boot up and down. Plus, my neighbors get to watch too. I’d really prefer to have a personal video player that only takes a few seconds to boot up and start playing.
Ah, now there’s a good use. I’m not sure it justifies all the hype still, though… they’ve had portable DVD players for flights for quite some time.
But a portable DVD player to me is like a CD player. I have to lug DVDs around with me. I’m not really sure what all the hype is about either… I’m just glad they’re doing it for my use.
In brief
I couldn’t just stop with all the links I gave you on Friday, so here’s some more computing stuff that I’m sure you’ll find interesting.