Trevor Baylis cranks multimedia up a notch
No we're not winding you up
Sitting down at the beginning of a long train journey to discover that you’ve forgotten to charge up your media player will soon be a thing of the past. Inventor Trevor Baylis back and this time he has turned his wind-up hand to the portable multimedia device.
The Eco Media Player uses an internal Lithium Ion battery which will give up to 40 minutes of audio play time from a minute’s worth of winding. It can also be charged via a USB 2.0 port to take advantage of the battery’s maximum 20 hours playtime. It can also charge mobile phones through the included connector.
The Eco Media Player
It has a 1.8in colour screen, capable of displaying 0.26m pixels, which can be used for viewing jpeg, bmp and gif images or for watching videos in asv, although WMV and AVI are supported through a conversion facility.
Trevor has built in a stereo 3.5mm headphone jack, though if you fancy annoying people on the train or plane it also includes a mono loudspeaker. Internal stereo line-in digital recording is also designed to allow content from external analogue devices, such as a tape deck, to be converted into MP3 and stored onto the player.
Trevor Baylis gets cranking
Short voice memos can be recorded through a built in microphone and radio frequencies selected between 87.5MHz and 108MHz.
The Eco Media Player is available from the end of August for £170 (€210).
COMMENTS
Re: Remeber 20yeears ago.
"PS: Stereo makes no difference in less than a meter apart from each other."
Actually, it does, and not just for the reasons stated above. There are certain mixing techniques that mean if both mono tracks are combined, or only one is played, some of the instruments are lost.
But, then, people who listen to music where this matters will probably be listening alone on expensive headphones or earphones.
Personally, I don't care about people playing "music" through tinny speakers on public transport though -- as I am one of those people I mentioned in the paragraph above.
Trevor's lightbulb moment.
"Bloody Windows. Forty minutes of arsing around for one minute of productive work. It's really f***ing winding me up........... hold on, I've got an idea!"
Re: Remeber 20yeears ago.
"PS: Stereo makes no difference in less than a meter apart from each other."
Actually it does, before I got my Archos AV500 I tried out a Cowon A2, the Archos AV500 has a single speaker and is pretty naff for listening to music/films but the Cowon A2 has stereo speakers and it makes a whole lot of difference when compared to the AV500. Turn on the A2's surround and the effect is fairly good, if watching a film where a car drives from one side of the screen to the other the sound travels with it more ot less, but with the AV500 the sound just gets louder and quieter with nothing to indicate which direction the sound is going.
The small Creative TravelSound speakers also have a surround switch which can greatly enhance the sound from films.
original
I'm sorry, is this guy going to get a round of applause every time he puts a handle on something that uses electricity ? Yes, granted, his wind up radio was nice, but surely the novel concept was the handle/storage cell combo, not that it powered anything in particular.
Que the wind up toaster, wind up cell phone , wind up multimeter ...
battering charging
You can buy today wind up battery phone chargers on eBay, e.g. the one from Orange can charge devices like cellphones.
Lyndsay Williams
www.lyndsayw.com
