Where Personal Entertainment Has Been, and Where It’s Going
June 5th, 2006 Jason Dunn
To understand where Windows Mobile media and entertainment is now, I think it’s important to understand what came before. Looking back on the history of when portable devices met personal entertainment, there are several notable devices. The first such device might be the portable radio. Initial radios were large, bulky devices that stayed in the living room of a home. They evolved into small, handheld devices that could be carried anywhere. The appeal? Music wherever you were, but the personal aspect was limited to the owner making a choice of which radio station to listen to. If you didn’t like what was on the radio, you didn’t have much of a choice.
The Sony Walkman TPS-L. Image courtesy of Sony History
Portable radios evolved into one the most popular portable entertainment devices of all time: the Sony Walkman. What made the walkman so popular so quickly? It blended the personalization of cassette tapes with the portability factor of a handheld radio. The combination of those two elements is what led to the explosive popularity. The Sony Walkman was first introduced in 1979 as the “Sound about” and was estimated to sell 5,000 units per month. Just two months after its release, ten times that amount (50,000) were being sold every month in Japan. When it made its way to North America, it quickly became a cultural icon.
Fast forward to today, and we have a huge assortment of digital audio players (commonly referred to as “DAP”), all bringing the same key ingredients as the original Walkman: they play back the content the user wants to listen to, and they are small enough to be portable. Almost every major, and minor, player in the computer and consumer electronics industry has stepped onto the field with everything from minuscule cube DAPs with flash memory to paperback book-sized media players with 100 gigabyte hard drives. The iPod is the market leader in hard drive-based players at the moment, but they have a lot of competition from some very determined industry players, so there’s plenty of choice.
A new generation of Windows Mobile Portable Media Centers, such as the Toshiba Gigabeat S, will blend the consumer friendly PMC interface with powerful synchronization options - all in a package that’s small and functional enough to go head to head with any portable media player on the market.