Digital Home Thoughts: Mvix Adds Multimedia Player Sauces to External Storage

"Lately, there have been few discernable differences between external storage products. Examples of value-add attempts include Western Digital's addition of fancy lights to its devices. Macpower simply designed an external drive that looks like an Apple Mac Mini. LaCie and Maxtor looked to add value by combining two hard drives to surpass the magical 1-GB capacity threshold. [However] Multimedia Player MV-5000U, from the Virginia-based Mvix, represents an ambitious device design that is more than just another storage product. Called a "multimedia player," the MV-5000U is an external hard drive that can also play backed up audio, video and photo files as a standalone unit that works with an IR remote control, while unconnected to another playback device or a PC. It can even broadcast audio content with an integrated short-range FM transmission module."



The transfer speeds on this device seem to be really good and feature-wise too, it seems to be able to do a lot - play all kinds of audio and video codecs, FM transmitter, remote. And for $229, it seems like a steal. But please be careful, remember that it doesn't come with a hard drive by default. The only real downside to this device seems to be its weight and form factor. Apparently, while they do sell a car adapter kit, it is big enough to be a pain to lug around. Well, either way, it seems to be a sweet addition to the basic functionality of a regular external hard drive.