latenlazy

Or, people just figure there's no point trying to guess or gripe. No one knows for sure, but we'll all find out eventually. My guess is they're letting stocks run low before releasing a successor though.

K, I've been lurking around for a few months now waiting for this player and I have two observations. 1. I doubt it's going to be priced at $400 stateside, might even be priced cheaper than the Ipod Touch. That's because the Japanese version of a lot of gadgets tend to have more features, in this case the Japanese version of the x1000 has Dual Sonicstage+Drag and Drop and a TV-Tuner. Because in Japan Sony does a much better job marketing its goods and has a larger chunk of the native market, it doesn't have to price things as competitively. Sony's not stupid (Note I am not a Sony fanboy). It will price things competitively based on local prices. 2. All this complaining about the video resolution makes me wonder. 320x240 is QVGA, but the screen itself is actually WQVGA. If that's the case, are widescreen videos compressed into 320x240 on the screen, or are they bumped down to a lower resolution with 320 as the cap or are they actually displayed in full WQVGA? Because looking at the demo videos and the pics (a lot of which just came out tonight) it seems the x1000 can play widescreen videos that take up the entire screen. Maybe they only market it as 320x240 because they assume most videos will follow the 4:3 screen ratio, but in actuality it can use up the total pixel count so long as the video is encoded at 16:9 screen ratio. I suspect this is the case because looking through the lest of encodings there seems to be one that allows for WQVGA and uses all the pixels the screen has to offer. If that's the case, then the x1000 is no worse and no better than its competition in the market, because the P3, Ipod Touch, and S9 all use WQVGA.