The P600's 30GB internal hard disk stored just about all the movies we could throw at it. Considering the player's 4-hour video-playing battery life (8 hours with audio), you'll run out of power a long time before you run out of things to watch. Most impressively, the P600 can render movies at full DVD quality on a large LCD screen. If you often have to present high-resolution material in the field, there's not much to beat this.
Other features include a slideshow-maker, calendar, phonebook and Java games. We might dismiss these extras as frivolous for a video player, but the mPack performs its core function -- video -- so well that it's easy to forgive these slightly gimmicky extras.
Performance
Video playback on the P600 is, even to our jaded eyes, exceptional. The clarity and resolution of the screen alone is a convincing reason to opt for this player -- it clearly trounces the Archos AV. The menu system remains a little idiosyncratic; many of the options will have the first-timer baffled. What, for example, does 'Caption Sync Start' mean to the average television viewer?
The image is bright and sharp. Watching A Shark's Tale revealed strong, confident colours that were accurate when compared to our reference display. More subtle material, like the movie Love Actually, demonstrated the P600's ability to render muted hues and fine picture detail without any artefacting or stutter.
For portable movie watching the P600 is hard to beat. Especially impressive is the player's ability to feed full-resolution video to a massive external display. This, coupled with its liberal compatibility -- it mounts on any filesystem as a generic USB hard disk -- makes it one of the most advanced handheld video-players out there. We've not seen a video player this fully featured from any other manufacturer yet.
Camera RAW file compatibility is an unexpected and extremely welcome bonus. This is exactly the kind of innovation the portable video player market so desperately needs to draw on if it's to achieve mainstream adoption. For now, the P600 raises the bar to thrilling new heights.
Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield
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