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Topic: The Mattel JuiceBox (Read 609 times) |
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ReeBop
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 Arlington TX
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The Mattel JuiceBox
« on: Jun 19th, 2005, 10:49pm » |
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After reading a Slashdot article on how the Mattel Juicebox was a fun hacking toy, I found out that Target stores in my area were discontinuing them for really cheap. I mean REALLY cheap. The unit itself was about $12 dollars. I also found out I needed the special mp3 / jpeg kit to really get it to do what I wanted, so, after calling 10 stores in my area, I found it also at 12 dollars. Here is what I got for my $24:
1. The Mattel Juicebox is a small media player with a color LCD screen. It's about the size of a cassette walkman. Mine is a wild Lime Green color. It takes 3 AA Alkaline batteries. Audio is achived through a small built in speaker or stereo through a headphone jack. The color screen is of decent quality and the demonstration cartridge clearly shows it's video capabilites.
2. The big news is that this unit runs an embedded Linux called ucLinux which I believe is stored on a 8 meg eprom chip inside.
3. The processor that runs the JuiceBox is the same ARM based processor that runs the Apple iPod.
4. The Media kit allows you to put 128 kbits/ sec mp3s on a SD or MMC memory card. The talk is that you can use at least a 512 megabyte card. Unfortunately, the Media Kit comes with only a 32 megabyte SD card.
5. The Media Kit also has special ripping software for music as well as graphics converter for their proprietary graphics format.
Well, with all that, I hooked up everything. I was able to put 12 songs on the SD card. An attractive color menu popped up with my song titles and you can navigate through them with the buttons on the unit. Unfortunately, it will balk at playing any mp3 better than 128 kbits/sec. The quality of those are sufficient though.
The big deal about this is the embedded Linux that runs this unit. The source code was recently released for this unit and I expect some serious code hacking to happen as we speak. Another big deal is that coders have already created a movie player for the iPod. What does that mean? Well, can you imagine investing in a couple of 1 gigabyte SD cards and putting a MPEG formatted movie on them? You would have in esssence a $24 pocket movie player!
Juiceboxes are starting to appear on eBay as well as the closeouts being done at stores across the US. I'll be keeping a close eye on events surrounding the free software that will be created for this unit. For now though, I have a simple portable mp3 player to play music and for use to receive podcasts I can easily take wherever I choose.
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