Portable Media Center's Officially Dead (No Kidding)
Portable
Media Center platform demise | If you have been waiting to buy a new
Portable Media Center with something like DivX support you are pretty much out
of luck. Jason has confirmed that
Portable Media Center’s are long dead, and Microsoft is no longer licensing out
the platform.
Oh well. Only saw
that one coming since a few years ago. I
believe that there were only five devices released under the platform, and
Microsoft then decided to take it over with Zune,
aka Portable Media Center v2.x with branding to attempt to compete with
iPod’s.
I had one of the Creative Zen Portable Media Centers. It was ok, but nothing special. The audio quality was horrible, and it was
too bulky to carry around for anything but video. At that point I had to carry two devices,
which in addition to a laptop was a bit much for me to bother with. The battery basically exploded a few months ago,
and I really haven’t looked back.
The platform had potential, but like most things within the
Media Center spectrum it suffered from lack of marketing and user awareness
mixed with lukewarm OEM support and of course, lack of codec support.
Creative got tired of the platform really fast and released their next
portable media player a few months after the Portable Media Center using their
own software.