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[newsposter]

AM/FM/HD radio
the 'top 5' digital audio formats
the 'top 3' digital video formats
720p video hopefully yes, 1080p video, not neccessary at all
reasonably recent Flash player
WiFi and Bt (A2HD)
HSDPA/3G+ ready
5" to 7" screen with a decent resolution/pixel density
GPS with traffic data (external module acceptable)
16-32 Gb internal flash memory
SDHD slot, NO mini-SD!!!
5 hours of battery life when playing back video
docking station for home and/or 12v mobile (auto, boat) use

Device sync via standard USB Mass Storage.  No use of mfgr-specific protocols or software.

I see that Cowon is pretty close with much of this.  Does anyone know of another mfgr that might be closer?

thanks!

[Peter_T]

The Archos 5 & 7 units come close, too, but aren't quite there (no flac, GPS with a bulky add-on).

[benn600]

Honestly, how difficult would it be for them to add FLAC?  How much does the decoder weigh?  few hundred kilobytes?  Talk about setting you apart from everyone else (for a small group of high end people).

But can any portable player even give good enough audio output quality to sort of justify FLAC?

[Peter_T]

Cowon (and some very proud cowon owners) claim that it can.  I don't buy it either.  It's nice (or comforting, or something) to carry around lossless tracks, and I could imagine a situation where you might go to a friends' place and want to - er - share the songs with said friend, but for listening on the subway, there's really no need.  Then again, with players getting more and more capacity there might not be any need to transcode, manage two copies of tunes, etc. 

Minidisc players used to be very good for portable sound - but I definitely couldn't tell the difference between SP and LP2 Atrac3-encoded tracks with my Shure E4Cs...  Both sounded golden.

[newsposter]

For 'lesser' media players, there is the open-source RockBox firmware project.  Rb does not yet support large-screen PMPs though.  It mostly supports N-2 generation media players to extend their life and functionality.

[newsposter]

It's trivially easy to have good quality hardware codecs in a handheld.  The manufacturing price difference is probably less than a dollar per unit sold.

But most manufacturers design a 'system' knowing full well that 99% of the time users will be listening through marginal quality ear buds.  So the analog output stages are often designed to be 'good enough' instead of 'best possible'.

[ThoBar]

Have you looked at the HTC shift and Advantage? They can do most of what you want I think...