Hey folks, Valkor here post CES 2006. And what a wonderful show it was. Only because everything was more spaced out in the other hotels and conventions centers, made getting around that much easier. So in 2005 we paid a visit to PQI, who showed us the powerful Mpack P600. It was a small yet very powerful portable media player that played just about every format there is from mp3 to divx, to mpegs and so on, all packed on an 80 gig hard drive. Not only that but the player can be plugged into your television or HD-TV and play full screen video in 800x600 (rare for this type of player) with Dolby 5.1 digital surround sound with no problem, all packed in a 30 gig hard drive. But it’s 2006. Would PQI have something new to show or give us more of the same? Mind you the P600 ain’t all that bad however it has been a year, could they have developed something new?
Enter the new contender on the block. Mind you the Mp600 was already a great piece of portable candy, now enter the Mpack P800. It’s almost the same as its little brother. But almost… in the farthest stretch. I mean the P800 does about the same thing as the P600, only it does it 20 times better. You get a bigger Hard Drive (80 gigs), you get a bigger screen (2.5” as opposed to 1.8”). You get a much longer battery life (10 hours audio – 4.5 hrs video) and you get more options to play with, such as you now get WMV and ASF to play with.
But enough specs, how does the P800 play compared to the P600? Again it’s a vast improvement over the P600 and the P600 was no slouch. They had the piece playing on a 40” LCD and the P800 was loaded with tons of movie trailers to try. The first piece I played was the X-men 3 trailer. It was pretty small and grainy, but the sound was awesome. I don’t blame the player because that honor goes into the quality of vid they had loaded in the device. The next trailer I tried was the Davinci Code trailer. It was high quality full screen and it played amazingly well with little to no compression grain showing. The sound was definitely Dolby digital all the way, which was crisp and very clear, much better than the X3 trailer and definitely much better than its predecessor. It has an onboard speaker, however it was really low. But I also blame the fact that we were in such an open space. Also I would suggest either plugging this bad boy into your speaker system or getting a really good pair of headphones. Lastly we got a good look at just how well the P800 does HD. I took a few snaps of player showing in full screen high def and while the pics don’t necessarily give you the full effect of what’s in store, you get a really good idea at just how powerful the P800 really is.
As far as anything negative is concerned, well I don’t have any. All testing was done on their equipment so until I get my hands on my own I have to give the PQI MPack P800 a temporary score of 3 and i'll add this: It is "the must have" portable media player above all. We’ll keep you guys posted on more of the P800 as soon as we get one in, because I really want to give this a higher score.
Email: valkor@the-other-view.com