MSI unveils 'posh' iPod Nano rival

And it's not a bad looker

Computex 2006 MSI isn't one of the world's best known purveyors of portable digital music products, but we were quite taken by its slimline P610 device, the company's alternative to Apple's iPod Nano. MSI also showed off its 1in hard disk-equipped P640 player.

The P610 is one of the few Nano-like offerings we've seen that actually looks good. It's almost mobile phone like, with the black plastic frame around its 1.8in colour display mounted above a simple stainless steel touch-sensitive control that's reminiscent of the Motorola RAZR V3's keypad.

The MSI device is a 8.5mm thick - the other dimensions are 9 x 4cm; the weight's 45g - but it packs in 14 hours' music playback time. MSI is equipping the P610 with 128MB to 4GB of Flash storage, ready to be filled with MP3, WMA and WMA DRM tracks via a USB connection. It'll also do Motion JPEG video playback and standard JPEG slideshows. There's the inevitable voice recording facility, but listeners will probably enjoy the SRS WOW 3D Surround audio enhancement more. It has an FM tuner too.

Use the P610 and you'll "feel posh", MSI tells us. We're not so sure that's the case with the P640, which offers the same functionality as the P610 but in a large case to accomodate either an 8GB or 10GB 1in HDD.

The P640 measures 9.5 x 4.6 x 1.3cm and a plastic touch-sensitive control panel. It weighs 80g and provides only ten hours' of continuous listening time. ®

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