Mossberg: Portable Media Center devices ‘not ready for prime time yet’

“There’s a tendency in the technology industry to think that, just because a product can be built, it should be built, even if all the necessary pieces to make it a success aren’t in place. Sometimes these premature products eventually become hits. Sometimes they just fail,” Walter S. Mossberg reports for The Wall Street Journal. “It’s too early to know which of those fates awaits the latest premature tech device: the handheld, hard-disk-based video player. But one thing is certain. It’s not ready for prime time yet.”

“The most prominent hand-held video player is the Portable Media Center, a design dreamed up by Microsoft and built, with different hardware designs, by three companies so far — Samsung, Creative Labs and iRiver. Based on my tests, I can’t recommend either player for mainstream, nontechie users. This is not so much because of the design of the players themselves. It’s because there’s so little video content available to play on them, and Microsoft’s software does a poor job of transferring commercial content to the players,” Mossberg reports. “By the time Apple’s iPod music player arrived three years ago, there were tens of millions of songs in the open MP3 format already stored on computer hard disks around the world. Most of these were downloaded from Web sites later ruled illegal, or copied from CDs people already owned. No such situation exists for the digital video that might fill up a Portable Media Center. Illegal downloading of movies and TV shows has been much less popular than illegal music downloads. And unlike CDs, DVDs are copy protected, so far fewer people have copied movies to their computers than copied music.”

Mossberg writes, “If you want a portable video device, you’re better off buying a portable DVD player. They can be bought for half the price or less, come with larger screens, and are able to draw from an almost unlimited selection of content.”

Full article here.

Related MacDailyNews articles:
Report: Portable Media Center ‘build it and they will come’ strategy unlikely to be successful – November 12, 2004
Survey says interest in ‘iPod Video’ low; results do not bode well for Microsoft – November 01, 2004
Clunky, chunky Portable Media Center devices are not very useful – September 26, 2004
AP: Using a ‘Portable Media Center only made me want an iPod mini and a new laptop instead’ – September 16, 2004