Toshiba quietly announced two new hard drive based portable media players aimed at taking a part of the Apple-dominated PMP market.

The two gigabeat models are part of the V series and, apart from the HDD capacity, share the same specifications. The V801 comes with an 80GB drive, while the V401 is fitted with half the capacity.

Two of the important features on the new PMPs are the 4.0 inch QVGA TFT displays with 24-bit color depth and the H2C audio technology.

When it comes to audio formats, the two players are compatible with the WMA, WMA 9 Lossless, MP3 and WAV (PCM), while for video, they work with WMV format. JPG image playback is also supported.

One of the strong selling points of the two players is the playback time. From the translated Japanese description it appears that for audio, you can listen to approximately 28 hours of music (WMA 128kbps 44.1kHz volume 6) or 10 hours of video content (WMV 500kbps). Quite an impressive performance, I must add.

In terms of weight, the two units are pretty light, with 264g for the 80GB version and 244g for the 40Gb version. By comparing the two values, one can easily observe that 40GB weigh 20 grams, which means that 1GB weighs 0.5 grams.

Unfortunately, the V801 and V401 are currently available only in Japan and there are no details on pricing.

80GB HDD-based PMPs are becoming increasingly widespread, but the flash players are not wasting any time either. According to numerous reports, several manufacturers are preparing 16GB version of their most popular devices. Interestingly enough, China-based Teclast might be the first to offer 16GB with their new T39. The impressive amount will be backed of course by a 2.6-inch touchscreen display (hooray for fingerprints!) with 262k colors and an array of media formats: mp3, wma, wav, flac, avi and wmv (30 fps).

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