Among the several interesting audio gadgets that were present at CES, MSI came with a new interpretation of its older P640 multimedia player. As you know, the P640 series has been around for a while but at the moment of the launch (somewhere in July 2006) the players used 1" hard drives to store the multimedia content. Two versions were available, one packing an 8GB disk and a larger 10GB one.

And because SSDs and large flash devices were present everywhere at CES, MSI decided to drop in with a flash-based version of its popular player. The P640 received the flash treatment and can now hold between 12GBs and 16GBs of data, depending on the version. And at 16GB, it is the biggest flash based multimedia player that I know of. Aside from the storage part, the player looks and performs about the same (except perhaps the weight and the power consumption).

Since there is no data regarding the standby and the exact weight of the device, I won't insist on these details. Instead, let me remind you some of its key features. The player can accept mp3 and wma on the audio part and mjpeg on the video part (320x240 is the maximum resolution). FM radio with recording function is optional but can be considered a plus. Moreover the player also supports photos (jpeg) and txt files.

I have to say that all these features put together in one device make a good player but that's nothing I haven't seen before (think at Iriver and Sandisk's Sansa line). However, other producers can only offer a maximum of 8GB on a flash device. And for the moment MSI's 16GB seem unreachable.