“MP4″ Player

Yesterday I received a package from a friend working in a local tech magazine. When I opened it up, I was surprised to find a small portable “MP4″ player branded as CD-R King MP4 Player M1820. The packaging is the usual blister pack that you need to have the strength of Samson to open it up, with scissors of course, unless you wanted to be cut up by very sharp plastic.
The tiny device can hold 1GB of anything, and supports MP3 and WMA. Since I have most of my music collection in OGG, this posed a bit of a problem, so I loaded most of the MP3s that I have on the device and decided to give it a go.
For a cheap device, its not so bad, it gives music as I want to, but I couldn’t use my favorite headset because the input jack is much smaller (I don’t know the exact size, but I might try looking for an adapter later). The device also supports images and small video (probably AMV, which isn’t really MP4), as well as simple text files that would fall under “E-book” category. Battery life isn’t really great, but suitable for a few hours of continuous playback. The 1.8″ TFT screen is bright, albeit the firmware having a clunky interface, which strangely works after getting used to.
Navigating through the music collection is a chore, as you need to pause playback first before selecting a folder. It doesn’t seem to have support for playlists or creating one on the fly. This would be nice to have, but most of the flash-based players I had before, good brands and otherwise, don’t have such support either. Upon close scrutiny of the firmware functionality, this is very much like an S1 MP3 device, only with more functionality (although useless most of the time).
Plugging it to a computer shows it as a USB flash device, so a simple drag and drop of the files work. Ubuntu shows this with a flash player icon and is even detected by audio specific software like Rhythmbox and Amarok.
Going over the details online, the real brand of this unit is Allfine developed by BTL International Development Ltd. For its price, I can only imagine how cheap this thing is to mass produce to its target markets. Heck the TFT screen might even cost less than $1USD. If some large-scale manufacturers can produce this with very cheap Bill-of-Materials, I can only imagine how much these things will cost in 5 years.