Although the German-company Grundig is not exactly a traditional manufacturer of portable multimedia players, it did manage to come up over time with some pretty interesting products, designed especially to cater for the needs and requirements of the European market. And that's exactly the case with the company's latest offerings, namely the MPixx 7000 Fine Arts and the MPixx 4000 series of portable media players, a couple of devices that provide quite a lot of interesting features, as well as a very good value for money.

The first of the two devices, namely the MPixx 7000 Fine Arts, is an advanced multimedia player that has been fitted with a high-contrast 2.4 inch TFT display with up to 262,000 colors and is operated via an intuitive, blue illuminated touchpad. The device works with MP3, MPEG4, WMA, WAV, OGG files but also WMA-DRM9/10 files (for music purchased from the Internet) and also sports a stereo FM radio with RDS and direct recording function (MP3), as well as 25 presets.

Moreover, it can be used as a photo viewer for JPEG / BMP photos and also supports a slide show feature. The PMP is powered by a Li-Polymer battery, with a maximum operating time of around 20 hours and is available in 2 models, the 7200 and 7400, which provide 2 and 4 GB of storage respectively.

Grundig's second offering is the MPixx 4000, which has been fitted with a huge 3.5 inch TFT display, capable of providing up to 262,000 colors, as well as an FM tuner, support for ID3 tagging and USB 2.0 speed connection. Moreover, the device provides some pretty interesting storage features, since it's been fitted with 1 GB of internal memory, as well as an SD card slot that supports memory cards with capacities up to 4 GB.

As mentioned earlier, the devices are designed and manufactured in the EU, namely in Germany. "This way, we are far better able to correspond to European tastes and user habits", says Oliver von Kospoth, Director Sound & Digital Media at Grundig. "And we can show that Grundig know-how, including the audio products, has created really excellent devices which are at the top of the league."

The devices in the MPixx 7000 Fine Arts series will retail for around 150 and 180 Euro (200 and 245 US dollars respectively) depending on the model, while the MPixx 4100 model (the only one released as of now) will cost around 150 Euro (200 US dollars). Both series will hit the shelves in October 2007.

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