Creative Lab’s Portable Multimedia Centre

We can look forward to yet another entrant to the growing portable media jukebox market – this time from Creative. The Zen Portable Multimedia Centre has a 3.8” TFT screen, 20gb hard drive and Windows Portable Media Centre installed.

The Portable Multimedia centre is compatible with Windows Media versions 7 to 9, will also play MP3 files and display JPG and TIFF images.

The unit can record video directly from a television tuner, as well as import files from Windows XP. Using Microsoft’s implementation of MPEG4 means that content providers will have full control over how movies are watched and stored with the device.

Creative are being tight-lipped about the unit’s battery life and weight, instead concentrating on it’s media playback and synchronisation features.

Creative Labs on the Zen Portable Multimedia Centre

More on the specifications

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?