Toshiba Unveils the New Wi-Fi Enabled Gigabeat T401 Portable Media Player

Toshiba's one of the best-known names on the consumer electronics market, but not necessarily for its Gigabeat line of portable media players, which, although quite impressive, have not enjoyed quite the same level of success as many of the company's other products. However, things might change in the future, as the Japanese company has announced the release of its Gigabeat T401 model, a flash-based device that delivers quite a generous storage space (4 GB) but, more importantly, wireless connectivity to content download services wherever there's a free hotspot at hand.

Thus, the new media player has come to fill in the gap between Toshiba's Gigabeat U model and its larger HDD-based players. We're talking about a relatively sleek device, measuring just around 54 mm x 9.9 mm x 86.5 mm, at a weight of around 58 grams, which sports a 2.4-inch QVGA TFT LCD display, capable of outputting 260,000 colors and a 320 x 240 resolution.

However, the main selling points of the T401 are neither its design nor audio features, but rather its impressive connectivity options. Thus, the device sports not only an 802.11g Wi-Fi module, but also an Internet connection, which means that it can easily download content from various websites without going through a computer first.

And since we're talking about content, it's worth mentioning the fact that Toshiba's new player works with MP3/WAV/WMA audio files, WMV movie clips and, more importantly, is compatible with Windows Media DRM10-protected multimedia files (which was to be expected, taking into consideration Toshiba's partnership with Microsoft).

The new Gigabeat will hit the Japanese shelves first and will be available in 2 models: the T401 and the T401S, which has been stripped of the WiFi capabilities, but comes in several colors. The T401 will retail for around $257 (starting with October), while the T401S will have a $214 price tag, when it becomes available in September. For now, there's no word on international availability, but I'm willing to bet that some (if not all) of the Gigabeat T401's components will arrive in other parts of the world as well in the form of Microsoft's "Draco" Zune.

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