The PhotoTainer (from InnoPlus of Korea) is famous and unknown. Famous for being the first portable multimedia device, upon which so many others are now modelled. Unknown, because you've probably never heard of it.
Do these specs sound familiar?
- 20GB hard drive
- 3.5" color screen
- Playback of MP3 music, JPEG, TIFF and RAW photos, AVI movies, and TXT text files.
- Playlists, slideshows
- Connect through USB2 and CompactFlash ports
- Acts as an external hard drive; backs up photos from memory cards
- Compact size.
The PhotoTainer had them first.
But to we PhotoTainer fans, the phototainer.com Web site has been dead, with no firmware updates since last August. Now we know why: InnoPlus was busy designing the next generation, to be sold by SmartDisk as the FlashTrax XT in May -- as illustrated above, the styling is radically different. (SmartDisk sold the original PhotoTainer under the name of FlashTrax.)
The FlashTrax XT is being called a "portable media recorder" and adds these specs to the original:
- Built-in FM tuner.
- Also plays back WMA music files.
- Watch slide shows while listening to music.
- Record video from external sources.
- Playback video in many more formats.
- Built-in mic
- US$399.99 for the 40GB version.
- $499.99 for 80GB.
Reading through the online manual:
- The Video In connector and the microphone are new. The battery is moved to the bottom.
- New folders (PVR and FM) store video and FM radio that has been recorded.
- The file listing screens now have two panes: file list (on the left) and Preview (on the right). This makes it easier to copy files, because you can see the origin and destimation folders at the same time.
- Bass and treble are still, unfortunately, only accessible in Setup mode.
- Movie mode now supports these formats:
MPEG4 SP (Simple Profile)
DivX 3/4/5 with MP3 audio
WMV9 SP
QuickTime 6 (MPEG-4 AAC-LC stereo)
XviD 1.0
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