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Introduction:::...
I
remember the buzz and excitement when CDs first made their
way onto the market. People marveled at the technology that
allowed ten or more high quality songs, or enough data to
fill over four hundred floppy disks, to be shoehorned onto
a tiny disk no more than a couple of millimeters thick.
It
never ceases to amaze me how quickly we learn to take technology
for granted, and today we barely give a second thought to
the little silver disk that single-handedly kick-started
the whole multimedia revolution.
The
reason for the demise in status of the CD can perhaps be
laid at the door of a seemingly harmless software development
that allowed us to take a piece of music and compress the
living daylights out of it without drastically degrading
its quality. I'm referring of course to the MP3 standard,
a clever little trick that can turn a 60MB music file into
one that's perhaps a tenth of that or less.
The
next nail in the coffin that was the CD's street cred was
the plummeting price of Flash memory, or memory that retains
its data even after the power is switched off. The ability
to cram a minimum of 64MB of data storage capacity into
a device no bigger than your thumb and at a price just about
everyone could afford meant that the addition of some kind
of MP3 decoding software or hardware was an obvious and
inevitable evolutionary step.
Thus
the MP3 player was born, and the music industry would never
be quite the same again. Today we've become almost blasé
about the idea of whole albums, possibly many of them, crammed
onto tiny devices that can swing round our necks or, at
the worst, slip into a pocket. As a result we've seen all
manner of players flood the market, some cheap, some not,
some pumping out crystal clear sounds, others managing a
rather muddy sounding resemblance of the original. Either
way, the foundations for cheap, high quality portable sound
is laid and there's a mad scramble from manufacturers to
be smaller, smarter, cheaper or otherwise better than the
competition. Apple may have mopped up the "cult status"
market with their omnipresent iPod, but the rest are left
looking for something to mop up the ditherers and those
who don't buy into the whole image thing.
The
product I have on review today isn't just an MP3 player,
it's an MPV player, which means it has video capabilities
built in too. The iBall is an interesting and innovative
product from GeIL, a company you may know of for its great
value and high performance memory products.
GeIL's
latest venture is a product line it calls DAViD, an acronym
for Digital Audio Video intelligent Device, and the first
product to grace this line is a tiny MPV player they've
christened the iBall.
Before
we see what it's all about here's a quick breakdown.
Specification
Decode
the video files MPV
SP/LP digital recording function
OLED multicolor and picture icon display
USB 1.1 Flash Disk function, support USB mass storage
Digital FM radio
E-Book / TXT reading
Multi-Language support with proper FONT files installed
3D Stereo Sound Effect
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