Amkette Flash TV Media Player

Remember Amkette? The monoliths of the now obsolete floppy disc, recently introduced their latest offering, the ultra portable Flash TV multimedia player for our market. It's small and interesting looking, plus today the market of multimedia players is proliferating with the entry of brands like Amkette, so let’s check it out.

Design and features
The player is really small; it can perfectly fit in the palm of an average sized hand. Clad in a milky white square chassis, the top side sports a print of the Amkette flash TV logo, adding a little zing to the otherwise straight up white aesthetic. The remote it comes with is also white, with a grey button surface. The side panels have the connections and remote sensor, the latter positioned alone on one side while power in, coaxial audio, component and composite video inputs are positioned on the opposite side. The USB slot and Memory card slot is positioned on the 3rd side. All necessary wires and batteries - nice white ones - are included in the package.

Amkette Flash TV Specifications include:

• Video Formats – MPEG – 1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB), AVI/MPEG4(DiVX 3-6x/XviD), DVD (VOB,MPEG), DAT and MPG, RM / RMVB
• Photo Format – JPEG, GIF, BMP
• Audio Formats - MP3, WMA
• AV connections – composite video; Component video;PAL/NTSC with 720P HD output. (No HDMI)
• Supported Storage Media - USB Hard Drive (NTFS, FAT32), USB Flash Drive and Memory Cards (SD, MMC).

UI and Performance
UI was very clean and nice, with a blue skin and fluid looking, large icons. Remote sensor is strong and works from wide angles, also the response of the menu is swift.
We had FAT32 and NTFS separate drives with loads of multimedia candy, especially tailored for these media player tests. Those were plugged in consecutively. Video was via the component out to an LG Jazz Theater TV and audio was via co axial out to a Denon reciever. Firstly, the device also has its own volume level, so one need not grope around for the TV remote during sudden surges of volume in your soundtracks.

The video output was quiet impressive in that it does what it claims, and no framing and hiccuping even for a DivX with 4600 kbps bitrate. This was a rip of our I am Legend DVD. There are regular video functions for zoom, video angle, subtitles, etc. A Go to function is present, that lets you jump to a particular section of a video file by entering the time. It upscales everything to 720 if selected, but cannot play an HD MKV or TS file. For this price that’s too much to ask.

Conclusion
This model is one of the cheapest (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) HDD based Media players out there at an MOP of Rs 2500. It has no HDMI but does 720p HD through component video, upscaled. It beats the WDTV mini in price. Overall it’s a recommend for movie buffs who are not totally anal about Full HD, or looking for a reasonably priced solution.