The Asahi Shimbun

The company aims to launch the 1st video-compatible portable music player.

Toshiba Corp. is looking to get the upper hand on rivals in the market for portable music players by launching the first unit capable of playing and recording video.

The player, due to be released by year-end, will come with an 80-gigabyte hard disk drive capable of storing dozens of hours of video footage, sources said.

Toshiba aims to gain ground on market leader Apple Computer Inc., whose iPod series has been a runaway success, and Sony Corp., which introduced an HDD Walkman in July.

The new player will be introduced simultaneously with a service to distribute music videos, scenic videos and other clips in cooperation with music affiliate Toshiba EMI, the sources added.

Competition among manufacturers is intensifying as they rush to enhance the functions of HDD-based music players, which, while small, can hold a huge amount of data and do not require users to carry around separate recording media such as CDs and MDs.

Some portable music players, including the latest iPods and a Gigabeat unit released by Toshiba in November, can already handle still images.

But Toshiba`s new video-capable music player will raise the bar and, the company hopes, also its share of the market.

The company says the music player will initially use Microsoft Corp.`s video format because the downloading of clips will only be possible through a personal computer.

In the future, Toshiba hopes to make Internet downloads possible using Toshiba`s DVD recorders.

Toshiba`s Gigabeat series debuted in 2002.(IHT/Asahi: January 4,2005)