Portable Multimedia Players, also known as PMPs, aiming not only at music playback but also at picture and video playback as well, is starting to get increasingly bigger shares of the portable media player market. According to Taiwanese manufacturers the pricing on the key components in the PMPs will drop drastically, among other things the LCD screen. The same source believes that PMPs pricing will drop from US$299-399 to US$99-199 making it far more affordable. Also the fact that most PMPs today support MP4 compression makes it even more interesting.
“Sales of PMPs have been short of expectations mainly because of high retail prices and the poor quality of video playback, the sources indicated. With adoption of on-chip MP4 compression, PMPs can play video at 20-24 frames per second making the resolution comparable with that of DVD video, according to the Taiwan-based MP3/PMP maker Ergotech.”
The logical assumption now is that more MP3 manufacturers will start to focus on the PMP market instead. So expect far more PMPs on the news this year, something also indicated by iSupply in one of their market researches.
