Screen saver: Putting genuine high definition in portable-media players is a bit like trying to craft the perfect diamond. If you pull off the act it looks brilliant, but the difference between it and the normal article is nearly impossible for laypeople to actually see. Despite doubts over whether the effort is worth it, electronics makers have been lining up to claim the honor of producing a real high-definition portable media player.
Local firm Hallods looks to have earned the kudos with their new F43 MP4 player. Its 4.3-inch 1280 × 720 screen can display content in full 720p high-definition. The drawback is that on such a small screen only the most dedicated pixel peeper, with eyes up close to the screen, is going to be able to tell the difference between images on it and those on similar screens with slightly lower resolution. Still, pictures and videos are going to look gorgeous on the Hallods machine.
Beneath the screen, the F43 sports 8 gigabytes of internal storage, expandable with a microSD memory-card slot. The gadget also displays videos encoded in 30-fps MPEG4, FLV, RMVB and DivX-WVGA formats, MP3, WAV, WMA, FLAC and APE music files and JPEG, BMP and PNG image files. It has a battery life of four hours when playing videos, and 10 hours for music.