MobiNote DVX-Pod 7010

It's a shame that something so full-featured as the DVX-POD 7010 has only a 20GB hard drive, especially when its shockingly clear 720 x 480-pixel screen begs for the kind of high-resolution files that fill up a drive quickly. Make no mistake: man has not yet created a pocket big enough for this video player. Its 6.5-inch widescreen display is surrounded by another bordering inch of white plastic, and it easily takes up the better part of a purse or backpack. It's worth it, though, to be able to watch ripped DVDs and recorded television at its native resolution, either by easily copying the files from your PC via USB 2.0, or using the built-in recording function. The DVX-POD plays a wealth of formats natively, including MPEG-4, Quicktime, WMV, and DivX 3, 4, and 5, meaning there's a better-than-average chance that it will play the video clips already sitting on your PC's hard drive. The built-in PVR functions let you schedule a single recording from an external source, but it's not even near the same class as the Archos AV420.

If we have one complaint about the DVX-Pod, it's that the huge LCD and the processor suck up battery life too quickly. You can probably eke out a couple of movies from the battery if it's topped off, but you're not going to last a second longer than that. Still, if you're going to haul around something that doesn't fit in your pocket anyway, why not go whole hog? The DVX-POD isn't portable videoNit's portable theater.