By the way, the inside of the player is lilac with touches of silver.  With a 7-inch wide screen, it’s like having your own little theater while sitting in the passenger seat of your car.  All you have to do is place it on top of your lap, lift the cover and you are ready to go. 

While traveling or just staying outside your house, you’ll experience the convenience of a desktop computer while browsing through your Shinco Portable Media Player.  According to this gizmo, it can play an amazing variety of media file formats such as ASF and AVI, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, JPEG, MP3 and WMA.  Of course, I really don’t understand what all these letters stand for but then, who cares anyway? 

All I know is that this player worked well for me while being able to store my favorite image and music files.  These are the picture and song files I faithfully, laboriously and meticulously keep in my PC.  It can store the family pics I value and it allows me to show them easily to friends.  It also plays my favorite worship album while spending half of my traveling time in heavy traffic.  And this library stores more!  It can store up to 40 gigabytes of music and pictures, and it can also store movies!

I was able to view clips and music videos and I found that the Shinco Portable Media Player, despite having average sound quality, displayed pictures brilliantly.  However, when I used the earphones provided with the player, the audio quality dramatically improved such that even base instruments were easily recognizable in the songs I played.

You can install movies, music or images in your Shinco Portable Media Player via different ways.  You can use a USB 2.0 cable, which comes with the package, to connect your PC and your Shinco Portable Media Player.  This is very easy for me because I can copy and paste files from my PC folders straight into the Shinco Portable Media Player folder.  Or you can use a Memory Stick, a Multimedia Card or a Compact Flash card in order to view your files.

But it was a hassle for me to convert files in DVD format to Multimedia and/or Compact Flash format.  It was frustrating not being able to play my favorite Korean movie while outside the comfort of my home since I didn’t know how to convert files.    

You can listen to your all your favorite songs but you must realize that the player can only play it only for a limited number of times.  The Shinco Portable Media Player may well be your biggest media library but it cannot go beyond more than 4 hours of playing time.  Although I have not tried watching a movie using this, surely the player can only play about one movie and a few songs before the battery runs out. 

However, the Shinco Portable Media Player is very user friendly and almost idiot-proof.  It is well-suited for an avid fan who keeps tons of pictures of his/her favorite Korean telenovela star.  This digital photo album can store about 400,000 pictures.  The Shinco Portable Media Player can also be a boon to a movie buff because it can store up to 55 movies.  And for the musically inclined, you can easily store your 8,000 most wanted songs.  Customizing the Shinco Portable Media Player according to my preferences is also easy.

A digital-bookworm who prefers to backpack and joy ride will enjoy this gadget, although I find it occupying most of the space in my little knapsack.  Better yet, carry it with your hands since you will never run out of things to view or listen to from this notebook.  More importantly, if you can afford £279.95 or Php 27,909.18 (mid-market rates as of 2005.09.27 05:39:28 UTC), you will probably want this 40 GB media library. 

Obviously, you are paying for the memory but the downside of this is that this player does not have the battery power it should have.  Be sure to keep a spare, fully-charged battery so you’ll be really ready to go.