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NEWS

Portable WiFi music downloaders debut at CES

From "True wireless media player in offing," by Ryan Nakashima, Associated Press, 11 January 2007:

"China's largest appliance maker, Haier Group, is teaming up with a subsidiary of AOL to make a wireless media player that can stream or download content without hooking it up to a PC. The product, which has yet to be named, was unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show and is set to be sold in the United States by the end of the second quarter.

"It looks like a regular iPod but does what even the new iPhone doesn't - access online music and video stores over Wi-Fi networks to stream, download and play content without having to sync up with a computer.

" 'The PC really isn't needed to manage your media library,' said Mike Wehrs, vice president of product management for AOL subsidiary Tegic Communications Inc...

"The Haier/AOL player, which will come with 30 gigabytes of memory, is the second device unveiled at CES that has a wireless music download capability.

"SanDisk Corp. showcased its Sansa Connect, a $249 gadget to sell in March that also detects Wi-Fi networks and allows one to stream Internet radio, search for songs, detect friends and send recommendations. The device will have 4 gigabytes of memory..."
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From "AOL and Haier's Unexpected Wi-Fi MP3 Player," by Sascha Segan, PC Magazine, 8 January 2007 (via Yahoo!):

"AOL and Chinese manufacturer Haier showed a Wi-Fi-packing, hard-drive-based music and video player with a touch-pad interface at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007) today.

"The 'Smartscreens Media Device by Haier,' a metal box about the size of an iPod, has a simple, text-based interface navigated by skimming your finger over a touch pad below the gadget's screen.

"It works with Windows Media music stores like Napster, Rhapsody, and Yahoo! and plays MPEG4 and WMV videos over wired or Bluetooth wireless headphones. The model we saw had a 30GB hard drive - the same size as Apple's entry-level iPod.

"Owners will be able to stream free Internet radio stations or download music from an online service through Wi-Fi 802.11g, said Joe DeAngelis, director of market development at AOL... That makes the Smartscreens Media Device's Wi-Fi capability very different from the Microsoft Zune's. Where the Zune's Wi-Fi is used primarily to beam songs to other Zunes, here the Wi-Fi will be used to download songs...

"The Smartscreens Media Device has an unusual story behind it: It's descended from one of the most tortured companies in the cell phone industry.

"About five years ago, a little company called Wildseed had a radical idea. They built the first mass-market Linux phone, a super-configurable head-turner called the Curitel Identity that changed its personality when you snapped a 'SmartSkin' cover onto it. SmartSkins held chips with data that added content, altered the phone's user interface, and even changed the phone's functionality - one of the 26 skins, for instance, turned it into a handheld gaming system...

"AOL bought Wildseed, and they decided not to make any more phones and instead focused on the SmartScreens platform: a Linux-based content delivery and application framework. The Smartscreens Media Device is the latest result...

"The Smartscreens platform is a 'framework that allows the flexible incorporation of different applications,' DeAngelis says, so both enthusiastic programmers and formal partners may be able to add applications to the gadget. After all, it's running Linux..."

"The Smartscreens Media Device will appear sometime in the second or third quarter of this year, DeAngelis said. He didn't give a price."

[WiFi - 12 January 2007]