Kingston has the best media player at Computex

KINGSTON HAS FOUR new flash products to show at Computex, two cute memory sticks, one update to their high end line, and a media player that was the best one I saw at the show.

The first one is the DataTraveler Elite Privacy, an updated version of the Elite. This stick has a lot of encryption functions built in, and is the top of the line Kingston stick. This new has a much sleeker grey metal case instead of the older silver coke bottle curves. It is the one in the bottom right.

Next up are two fun ones, the Mini and the Mini-Fun. The mini is the brightly colored little 'plug' versions with the sliding cover. They are quite small, come in 512MB and 1GB sizes, and will be available from August. The Mini-Fun are the other brightly colored ones with two 'legs' on them. You can lock them together like legos, or mix and match colors, butI think today's video game generation will find them far less addicting than WoW. They come in 256MB, 512MB and 1GB, and should hit stores in late July.

Let's show you what they look like.

The last one is the only media player that really caught my attention. It seems like every stand has a media player of some kind, but the Kingston K-PEX (Kingston Portable Entertainment eXperience) was by far the best one. It comes in 1 and 2GB models with a 4GB to follow late in the year, and has a slot for memory cards.

The player does the obvious, plays most formats like AVI, most MPEGs, WMV, ASF, MP3, OGG and WAV. It can also display JPEGs and show TXT files. You have conversion/transcoding software on your PC to rip the movies to the K-PEX, so with a little brainpower, you can get almost anything on your player.

The screen is 2 inches with a rez of 200*176. If you transcode your movies to that rez, you can get hours and hours on a 1GB model, and a 4 with a 4GB card will last nearly forever. The batteries are claimed to last up to 18 hours, but that is most likely for text file viewing with the backlight turned down. Expect about 2 hours while watching movies, enough for a thriller, but not much more.

It has two other features many players do not support. The first is a voice recorder, something they all should have, but few end up actually doing. The other is something I have never seen before, downloadable Java games. It can load and play many types of cell phone java games without any added effort. Two ship with the system, and the Kingston page will probably link a bunch of others. Very cool.

The most important part is how does it work? I didn't spend a huge amount of time with one, but the screen was very high quality, and playback of movies looked very smooth. If the K-PEX lives up to the initial impression I have, it is going to be a big winner. It will end up costing $120 for the 1GB, $160 for the 2GB. For an easily pocketable movie player and games machine, this is a steal. µ