I’m really excited to share this – I’ve been keeping it semi-secret ever since I found out about it.  While I was at Tech Ed, I won a contest sponsored by Microsoft and the Excell Data Corporation.  The grand prize was a portable media center from Creative!  The same model Michael has.  It finally came in the mail last Friday and I’ve been playing with it ever since.

It’s really a cool device, about a third larger than my cellphone (although it does have a protective case that makes it seem much larger than it really is).  The thing (and case) actually does fit in my pocket, but not entirely comfortably.  Anyway – about the device itself:  think of it as an iPod capable of displaying movies!  It is way more than that, but that seems to get the message across the best.  It runs Microsoft’s Portable Media Center shell on top of Windows CE – which means it turns on and off instantly.  It plays music – both WMA and MP3 (WMA results in a slightly smaller file).  It shows photos (JPG is the only format I’ve tested).  It plays videos (WMV videos, but the process of putting AVI and MPG videos onto the machine encodes them into usable WMV format).  It even allows you to play music while watching a slideshow of your favorite photos!  The 20 Gb drive holds so much stuff that with 465 songs, 173 pictures, and 66 videos (including a full length movie) I’ve only used up 3 Gb.  I took a 2 hour movie (The Missing with Tommy Lee Jones) off a DVD and encoded it down to 318 Mb and put it on the thing.

Check out this great review from a Media Center MVP

I don’t know if I’ll attempt developing for the device, I’ve got lots of stuff on my plate at the moment and I never have free time.  I’m sure I’ll be randomly posting about what I do with my PMC (like, if I ever write a useful program for it).

-- Matt Ranlett

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