LAS VEGAS—AOL and Chinese manufacturer Haier showed a Wi-Fi-packing, hard-drive-based music and video player with a touch-pad interface at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007) today.
The "Smart screens Media Device by Haier," a metal box about the size of an iPod, has a simple, text-based interface navigated by skimming your finger over a touch pad below the gadget's screen. It works with Windows Media music stores like Napster, Rhapsody, and Yahoo! and plays MPEG4 and WMV videos over wired or Bluetooth wireless headphones. The model we saw had a 30GB hard drive—the same size as Apple's entry-level iPod.
Owners will be able to stream free Internet radio stations or download music from an online service through Wi-Fi 802.11g, said Joe DeAngelis, director of market development at AOL. While they're listening to music, owners will get suggestions for additional songs, albums and similar artists powered by the Internet-based service.
DeAngelis kept just barely avoiding saying that AOL would provide the service, saying instead that "our long-range plans are to come up with an offer that's really compelling … in the longer term, we're looking at filling out the content lineup."
About five years ago, a little company called Wildseed had a radical idea. They built the first mass-market Linux phone, a super-configurable head-turner called the Curitel Identity that changed its personality when you snapped a "Smart Skin" cover onto it. Smart Skins held chips with data that added content, altered the phone's user interface, and even changed the phone's functionality—one of the 26 skins, for instance, turned it into a handheld gaming system.
But Wild seed had tremendous trouble bringing the idea to market. First they arranged a contract with manufacturer Kyocera, but that exploded in a shower of lawsuits in 2003. They then went back to the drawing board and ended up with the Identity, which was never produced in sufficient quantities to be affordable to its teen target market and ended up on only one regional carrier, Dobson Cellular.
AOL bought Wild seed, and they decided not to make any more phones and instead focused on the Smart Screens platform: a Linux-based content delivery and application framework. The Smart screens Media Device is the latest result. Unlike their last effort, though, the former Wild seeders don't need to sell their product to a picky wireless carrier; instead, they have the power of a zillion-dollar media company behind them.
The Smart screens platform is a "framework that allows the flexible incorporation of different applications," DeAngelis says, so both enthusiastic programmers and formal partners may be able to add applications to the gadget. After all, it's running Linux.
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