01-21-2007, 07:22 PM

(sorry if this is already been discussed in other thread)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=aZdk6J4hbFEg

Reading this article reminded me of an program that Microsoft offered for free as early as 2000. It was supossed to be help transfer media files from your PC to your (still) Windows CE machine, it had the "advantage" of compressing all your music files to WMA format in a very low bit rate and also copied the playlists and organization that you had in your PC. This came with another program that was used to compress video also to smaller bit rates to fit the devices at that time. As far as i remember this was older than iTunes and never had an important marketing, plus the price of memory at that time didn't allowed a cheap, practical use.
Some people started to adapt hard drives to their devices and devices compatible with IBM's MicroDrive started to gain popularity, this reduced the sales for HP's Jornada devices and helped the new iPAQs comaptible with both Compact Flash Card and PCMCIIA.
I read many ideas on how to turn your PDA into a media player, and at the time it was a great idea, but battery life was a big issue and it was impossible to upgrade the media player, i remember many (in the Microsoft hosted newsgroup) said that Microsoft was thinking about a PDA oriented as a media player.
Anyway, i just wanted to share a some thouthgs and memories.

01-21-2007, 07:27 PM

Nice read, thanks.