Creative's 'video iPod'

This kind of spoils the surprise for the big Creative launch we're hauling our backsides into town for tomorrow. We've been promised someone very senior at Creative will be blowing us away with a new product that we'll be the first to see. Not counting all the many thousands of people who've already seen it online, that is. We could of course be wrong, but we're expecting the big announcement to be this Creative Zen Vision:M video MP3 player, which has just surfaced on the Japanese Creative website. It's pretty similar to Apple's latest video playing iPod, and comes with a 30GB hard drive and a 2.5-inch 320 x 240-pixel screen.

It's going to be a bit thicker than the video iPod (by which I mean fatter, not "more stupid" - although who knows?), but it will play back a lot more file formats, including MP3 and WMA audio, plus MPEG 1,2 and 4 video, DivX and Windows Media Video. It also has an FM tuner and voice recorder. No indication on pricing as yet, but hopefully it will be less than the 30GB version video iPod which sells for just over £200.

Engadget