Acer iPod Video Contender

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Acer beats Apple to the punch with a touch screen portable media player

Acer appears to be taking a page out of Apple's book and is releasing its own touch screen based portable media player. The Acer MP-500 comes complete with 3.5” touch screen and a rather meager screen resolution of 320x240 -- basically what you get on a Windows Mobile 2005 based PDA.

The 7 ounce unit can be equipped with either a 20GB or 40GB hard drive and can operate for as long as 4 hours when playing back video and up to 8 hours when only audio is being played. Supported audio formats include WMA, MP3 and AAC. It is not known what video formats are supported, but one would expect MPEG, AVI, ASF and WMV support among others.

Acer is certainly not the only one in the ultraportable market. Microsoft recently leaked details of the Origami project, Nokia is working on a successor to the 770 tablet and Apple certainly isn't twiddling its thumbs either. If last year was the year of making these devices as small as possible, 2006 looks like it could easily be the year of the

video shootoff.