Another slow week here at TechJapan, as my semester comes to a close. Expect to see a lot of changes here at TechJapan in the month of December -- o­nce the semester actually ends, I plan o­n making things around here run much smoother.

Our product of the week for this past week is Logitec's "dvdjuke Pod."

Product Name 
Logitec dvdjuke Pod

Product Image(s) 
[1]

Product Code
LAV-DJP80U2, LAV-DJP40U2

Vendor
Logitec

Release Date
Early December, 2004

Price
44,100 yen for 80GB model, 32,970 yen for 40GB model

Overview
Logitec's new "dvdjuke Pod" is a portable hard drive with TV output. It sounds simple, and that's because it is -- not o­nly does it serve as an external hard drive for your PC, but it serves as a "media center" o­n its own. By simply connecting the device to your TV and audio system using its included interfaces, it can play media files stored o­n the hard drive itself. So, it's like a DVD player, though much smaller, and requires no discs.
Also, it supports playback of compressed formats, such as MPEG-1/2, DivX, and XviD.

Reasoning
The dvdjuke Pod struck me as o­ne of the first fully featured "external hard drives that also serves as a media player." We've seen other hard drive/media players come through here, but they had always been missing some key feature; it seemed to me that the dvdjuke Pod finally approaches a product that I'd actually be willing to purchase.
It has a lot of what I wanted -- an up to 80GB capacity, DivX AND XviD playback (most products seem to have a "one or the other" complex), S-Video output, and optical audio output. In fact, the o­nly thing that I find missing from the dvdjuke Pod is network support, whether that be in the form of 802.11b/g wireless or even wired LAN. Also, there's no WMV playback, but I'm willing to live without it. Apart from these two complaints, the dvdjuke Pod appears to offer everything that I've wanted in a device of this class.

Official Product Site 
http://www.logitec.co.jp/products/mplay/lavdjpu2.html [2] [3]

Related TechJapan Coverage
Logitec portable HDD with TV output [4] (November 15th, 2004)