Mindstab.net

So this morning I was reading Paul Graham's newest essay "Why to Not Not Start a Startup" (Good read as always). Got started but then it was time to leave for school but I wanted to keep reading it. Dilemma! So on a whim I grabbed my cell and plugged it in, copied the article text to gedit and saved it as a text file on my cell. On the bus I checked and my cell's web browser worked as a serviceable text reader. There wasn't glorious screen real estate, but it wasn't appealingly small either, a screen or three per paragraph. So I got to read the article on the way to school. Thanks technology.

This morning's events got me thinking, I want a portable multimedia tool. My GP2X was pretty good at this, except that my first edition (damn being a technology early adopter) had the small problem that the headphone port was mounted mere millimeters too deep so I always had to jam the jack in which promptly caused the port to snap off and fall inside the GP2X. Even after re-soldering it on, it had the same mounting problem, and it's coming loose again. The first indication in both times is that it stops turning off the external speakers even with the headphone jack in. Lame. And not covert. So I don't take my GP2X on the go anymore. But enough of that. I'd probably buy a GP2X now if I didn't already have one.

Why? The GP2X is great. More than people realize. It does music (ogg/mp3), sure, and true, my 1GB iRiver T30 [apparently off the market now] has this fairly covered, but where it shines is its movie playback capability, which I no longer have covered. Portable movie players cost about $300-$500 CDN easy (when I looked last summer). The GP2X comes in more like $200 CDN. And it's better. Why? Because it has mplayer. You don't need to transcode your videos to some weird and small format before you can take them on the go, just drag and drop them into your GP2X, mplayer can handle anything. You of course are free to still transcode them so they waste less space, but that's your choice. If I was in a hurry I could just drop a movie or two shows on a 1GB SD card and watch them on my GP2X. And everyone else wanted me to pay twice as much for a device that is a greater inconvenience (ok, so they do have like 20GB harddrives...).

This got me thinking about the talking I've been hearing about how everything is dying out to the phone, or smart phone. PDAs and music devices (Will The iPhone Kill The iPod?) are falling by the way side being replaced by integrated cell phone solutions. Cell phones with cameras, 4GB of storage, and mp3 and video capability are just coming into mainstream right about now (don't get me started about the new trend of kids huddled around a cell blaring off their music through appallingly bad speakers while in public spaces like the bus). This means that those portable media players are next to get hit before they even really take off.

Ok, so super integrated and featureful smart phones seem to be the future. But will they be any better than the current media players? Well, I was then reminded of Christian Schaller's guest appearance on LUG Radio a few weeks back. He mentioned that his company, Fluendo (a GStreamer company) were in talks with most of the major [European?] cell companies. GStreamer is the new (~2002) defacto Open Source (maybe just Gnome) media framework, but they also have for-money proprietary codecs as well (like mwv). So if the GStreamer framework started showing up on most cell phones I'd be well pleased. Nokia is surely covered in this due to the fact they already ship the Linux and GStreamer powered Internet Tablet N800, which is a pretty cool device all on it's own. Plays video, music, surfs the web.

Hell, I'd have bought one already if it was a phone too. :)