Digital Home Thoughts: Mobius 2005: Portable Media Center v2.0 (Revenge of the PMC!)

Camera Companions
Next, they discussed the camera companion feature. I was initially excited about this feature, but the implementation leaves a few things out. Cameras can connect directly to the PMCs using USB 2.0, or use memory cards (CF or SD, depending on the hardware). The photos from the cards can be copied over, and when the process is complete the user is presented with an option to erase the card if they wish. What the process lacks, however, is any sort of data verification. If I'm going to copy over a memory card with 400 photos, I'd want to know that the photos on the device are a bit-for-bit copy of what's on the card before I select "Yes" to the delete option. When I brought this up they said the concern was making the process longer and thus having a negative impact on battery life.

I think the real bottleneck is the speed at which the images can be copied off the card, so adding a second thread doing bit verification wouldn't seem to be that much of a drain on resources. Still, this is a much-needed feature that will add another dimension to the ways a PMC can be used. I believe they also mentioned that when the images are copied over, a copy is made and resized to 320 x 240 for optimal performance. Your original photos are kept at full resolution elsewhere on the PMC. I wonder if the 2x zoom only works on the resized photos (which would be useless) or if it also works on the full resolution images.

Other Enhancements
The photo browsing experience has been improved – they've added pan and zoom at 2x so you can examine your photos more closely, photo browsing by date, and an improved thumbnail grid view. All in all, these features will allow users to find the photos they want easier than before, which is a good thing.

Pete handed around several Portable Media Center devices, and all had tape over the brand names so we couldn't see which device was which. I'll say this much: there's finally some variety! We saw everything from a small iPod-sized unit with a square screen to a much larger widescreen unit with a 16:10 ratio screen. There's definitely some innovation in the hardware now, which is great to see.

There was some discussion throughout this session and others that the media playback and browsing interface on the PMC is so vastly superior to the hodge-podge of Windows Media Player 10 Mobile and the Pictures application in Windows Mobile 5. Interestingly enough, WMP10 Mobile used to be developed by the Windows Media Player group, but it's not under the roof of the PMC team. So odds are good we might see some version of the PMC media access interface on Pocket PCs and Smartphones. I think this would be a welcome move because it's so much faster at getting to the content you want to see/watch/hear. We'll see!

Where Are the 307,200 Pixels I Want to See?
My one concern though is that everything is still QVGA - 320 x 240. None of the units have VGA screens, which makes them lag behind something like the Creative Zen Vision or the Dell X51v Pocket PC, both which have VGA screens. When I pressed them about the lack of VGA, the reluctance to move to VGA seemed to stem from three factors: cost, performance, and battery life. VGA screens are expensive, they push 400% more pixels than QVGA, chewing up CPU cycles and battery power, and the more I research the Zen Vision (I was keen on buying one) the more I understand how they were able to sell it for $399 with a VGA screen: they picked a cheap VGA screen. Every review I've read complains about how bad the screen is, especially at off-axis viewing, and the PMC guys don't want to compromise the user experience - but they do want to get the prices down to a different level than the first generation units, which means QVGA.

I'm confident that I'll pick up one of these 2nd generation PMCs, but the question is which one - it will be nice to have a choice when the time comes (which sounds like Q1 2006). It's a pity that they'll miss the holiday buying season, but let's hope it will be worth the wait.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.