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The Coming Personal Media Player Push

Techstination feature for Friday, March 12, 2004

The coming push for personal media players. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Intel says there's a scramble on among consumer electronics and computer makers…to design and build personal media players in time for holiday selling season later this year. Intel is hoping to sell lots of its Xscale processors for the new portable devices that will allow consumers to carry around digital video along with music and pictures. The company's Todd Altman says…

"Well I think one of the things we expect is for this to become one of the hot categories for holiday '04 people will want to have. The latest and greatest gadget, really taking MP3 players to the next level. Now I can not just take my music with me. But I can take video and pictures with me in a very cool, small form factor device that we believe is very compelling."

Creative Labs and Samsung have been showing devices they'll be selling this year. Altman says they differ from portable hard drive video players being sold by Archos Systems and RCA already…

"We've spent a considerable amount of time working with, in this case Microsoft, to develop a closer integration with the PC."

The idea is to make it easy to store, say your favorite TV shows, on the player. Intel and the manufacturers hope consumers who are willing to spend three or four hundred dollars on Apple's popular iPod music players…will like the idea of a device that can play video as well. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.