Feature Articles

Enjoying a Decade of Portable Entertainment

By Seow Tein Hee - 16 Apr 2009

Timeline: 2002

2002


  • While digital audio players have picked up steam over the past three years or so, the visual front was just kickstarted in 2002 with the introduction of the first portable video player from the French company, Archos. Though touted as a portable device, video players were by and far a tricky business since one can't compromise too much on screen size to fit the portable aspect of the device.

    With that in mind, the Archos Jukebox Multimedia was born as the first portable media player capable of audio and video playback, with support for MPEG4, DivX and Xvid for its video formats. And with camera phones on the rise during that era, Archos went the extra mile to provide various other modules that can be docked onto its Multimedia Jukebox, allowing you to perform image and video captures onto the device.

Being the first of its kind, the Archos Multimedia Jukebox portable media player would go on to be one of the bigger names in the PMP industry in the years to come.

  • Though the digital MP3 format is gaining popularity amongst the consumers, the predominant audio media, the compact disc, is still well and alive. Manufacturers, in a bid to give ample support to the CD format that was once the most popular format, have tried numerous means, such as a portable CD player capable of MP3 format playback , to give the CD a boost in their sales.
  • Parallel port data transfers are slowly fading into the background, as the USB and FireWire standard became widely adopted by both Apple and Creative. In 2002, the Zen branding was introduced on a new line of portable players by Creative, dubbed as the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen.
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