Last week, The New York Times carried rumours about Microsoft's "portable music player", and it seems they may have been just a touch misleading. One of Microsoft's local papers, The Seattle Times, has it differently. Columnist Brier Dudley writes:
What's being developed is actually a complete line of Xbox-branded digital-media products, including a device that plays media, a software media player and an online media service.
It has Wi-Fi capability so it can connect wirelessly to home and public networks and other players.
Wi-Fi sounds like a big deal if you're comparing the player to the wire-bound iPod. But this is more than just another MP3 player. It will also compete with game players from Sony and Nintendo that have long had Wi-Fi and work as media players, Internet terminals and communication devices.
In other words, this sounds more like what we expected from Dean Takahashi's story in The San Jose Mercury News in March -- see Handheld Xbox could take on Sony's PSP, below.
Microsoft would be inherently wary of competing directly with partners who use its software in portable music and video players. However, it's perfectly normal for games console companies to produce related portable devices, and an Xbox-branded device probably wouldn't create problems, even if it didn't play games....
