Electronic gadgets are all the rage these days and so many electronics companies are making them, that for any one device to really stand out ahead of any of the others, it needs a real edge over the competition. This is especially true among portable video devices. Some portable video devices rely on being trendy. Others imitate the trendy ones. Some rely on being ridiculously big (one hundred and sixty gigabytes) while others rely on being ridiculously small (who's really going to be able to put one gigabyte to use for video?). Out of all of these imitators and competitors trying to get an edge on each other, a completely new portable video device with a completely new concept has come from a completely unexpected source. The portable video device is the PocketDish and the source is the satellite TV provider Dish Network.
There are actually three models in the PocketDish lineup, and they all superficially resemble other portable video devices. They can play MP3's and other sound files in addition to video. They can also store and display digital photos. They display video and photos either on their built in color LCD screen or over just about any television monitor. They can also serve as portable video game platforms which may or may not be that common among portable video devices. It's hard to tell. They also have batteries that can play video for hours or music for as much as half a day.
The feature that sets the PocketDishes a step above their competitors is the fact that they can download video from Dish Network satellite receivers that have digital video recorders built in. All you have to do is program the digital video recorder to record the TV shows or movies that you want to download to your PocketDish. When the video is recorded, you can plug the PocketDish into the USB 2.0 port on the digital video recorder and tell it which programs you'd like to download. The two machines will then work together in order to transmit the videos to the PocketDish at a rate of about one hour of video for every five minutes of download time. The PocketDishes can hold up to twenty, thirty, or forty hours of video downloaded from Dish Network depending on which model you opt for.
As an added bonus, the two more advanced PocketDishes can record video from a wide variety of other electronic devices. This includes just about anything that can play video over video out jacks that the PocketDish can connect to. This makes the PocketDish a great way to collect video from a variety of sources. It can even serve a repository for someone who likes to shoot video on a camcorder. The fact that all of the video recorded this way is stored in MPEG-4 format means that you can store up to one hundred and twenty hours or up to one hundred and sixty hours on your PocketDish, depending on which model you get.
When an electronic device that has this many distinguishing features enters the market, the competition needs to look out!
