What struck me most about the photo of the Mambo Digital Media-X PhotoBank Jukebox on the right is the ability to insert an MMC/SD memory card into what is a jukebox style portable. When you think about it the idea makes quite a bit of sense.
As almost all other electronic products matured in the market and prices dropped, most households ended up acquiring multiple VCR’s, TV’s and cassette players. It stands to reason that the same will happen to newer digital products like cameras, MP3 players and Tivo/ReplayTV devices. In some homes it already has. Now take that fact and leverage another one. A portable jukebox player with 10GB or more of space can easily house and transfer those photo and music files, feeding other forms of digital devices and saving
continual trips to the PC
Enter the Mambo Digital Media-X PhotoBank. By giving the unit the ability to read and write onto a flash memory card the conveniences become apparent. There are plenty of owners of portable flash players who are tired of constantly running back and forth to their system every time they want to change the 15 tunes on their player. They yearn for a 20GB unit like the PhotoBank Jukebox, but don’t want to give up the size of their flash unit because its much lighter weight and smaller dimensions are more convenient for certain places like the gym.
A jukebox unit like the Mambo offers the best of both worlds as it doesn’t replace the older unit, but instead offers it new life by presenting a more convenient way to change the music files on the flash card. The older player now becomes exclusively the exercise unit, saving wear and tear on the newer one whose size made it less suitable for the task anyway.
The Mambo is not the only MP3 portable to have this idea actually. The recently released Archos Jukbox Multimedia will offer a photo module as an option that does the same thing. The difference is the Digital Media-X PhotoBank has it built into the structure of the unit without the need to purchase an add on piece.
The features on the Digital Media-X PhotoBank are pretty extensive. The Digital Media-X PhotoBank first and foremost is an MP3 player supporting the MP3 and WMA formats. Offering 20GB of storage the unit weighs in at 9.8 ounces, lighter than the RCA LYRA Personal Jukebox (11oz) and the Creative Nomad 3 (14oz), but more than the Rio Riot (8.8oz) and the Apple iPod (6.5oz). All of the competing unit’s also use a 2.5-inch hard drive except for the iPod whose Toshiba 1.8-inch drive accounts for its weight savings.
The unit offers a healthy 8MB of internal buffer for anti-shock and is the third unit we have come across to adopt the USB 2.0 standard for file transfers (The iPod and the Nomad 3 use FireWire). USB 2.0 transfers files roughly 40 times faster than USB 1.1.
The Mambo Digital Media-X PhotoBank allows both the storage of photo files in the JPEG format . Viewing these files from the player takes the purchase of an optional expansion unit called the Photo Expansion Box ($49.95 MSRP). The unit also supports the MPEG format, hinting that a video display module is in the works
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