Introduction

Before the coming of the Zune, there once was a portable player called the Toshiba gigabeat S. In fact, many considered the gigabeat S as one of the best of the new breed of Windows Portable Media Center (PMC) based media players. Unfortunately for PMC devices, the recent launch of the Zune has overshadowed many of these very capable devices which includes the Toshiba gigabeat S. What many people don’t realize is - PMC devices offer many of the same capabilities found on the Zune AND also happen to be compatible with PlaysForSure music sites. Sure you don’t get wireless connectivity but if you don’t care about that feature, then a PMC device such as the gigabeat S can be quite compelling.

The Toshiba gigabeat S line consists of two versions - the S30 which is in piano white and comes with 30GB of storage space and the S60 which is in piano black and has 60GB of space.

So join me as we take a look at the 60GB version of the Toshiba gigabeat S series - the S60.

Features galore..

Before jumping into the player itself, let’s take a look at the major features of the Toshiba gigabeat S60:

• 2.4 inch diagonal TFT QVGA LCD color screen
• Up to 12 hours of battery life for audio and 2.5 hours for video
• Built in FM tuner with 30 presets
• Windows Mobile Portable Media Center
• Compatible with PlaysForSure audio and video
• Works with Windows Media Player 10 and 11 beta
• Supports WMA Lossless, WMA, MP3, WAV music files and JPEG photo viewer

The technical specifications on the gigabeat S60 include:

• 60GB 1.8 inch hard drive
• Freescale i.MX MPU
• Measures 2.36″ x 3.93″ x 0.58″
• Weighs 5.3 oz

The gigabeat S60 comes with

• Toshiba gigabeat Portable Media Player
• AC Adapter with cable
• USB cable
• USB conversion cable
• AV cable
• earphones
• software CD-ROM
• Documentation

A look at the S60

Let’s take a look at the S60 itself.

Here are shots of the front of the S60.

From top to bottom, you’ll find the 2.4 inch diagonal TFT QVGA LCD color screen, the Back and Start menu buttons, and navigational controls to use the PMC interface.

Here are shots of the back of the S60.

 

Here’s the top of the player.

 

Here you’ll find the headphone jack, and the hold switch.

Here’s the bottom of the player.

 

The bottom of the S60 has two connectors. One is a USB connector while the other is a connect terminal which is not currently used. The USB connector is used to sync content with a Windows PC and also provides a way to charge the device. You can also charge the S60 by connecting the AC adapter.

Finally, here are the sides of the player.

 

There’s nothing on the left hand side but the right hand side has several controls. There’s a power button up top, a volume control rocker, and controls for previous, play, and forward.

The first time I saw these controls, I thought back to the tape cassette player days. Although you could always use the front controls to navigate the PMC UI, the side controls give you additional control over specific actions. It’s a bit awkward at first - especially if you’re used to something like the Apple iPod but it grows on you fairly quickly.  

The only problem I have with the side controls is with the control icons painted next to the controls. After a few months of usage, the icons on the player began to fade away. It’s a good thing the controls are easy to remember!

The Portable Media Center UI

If you’re familiar with Windows Media Center based PCs, then using the gigabeat S60 will feel like old hat to you. PMC user interfaces are designed to mimic the Windows Media Center UI which is extremely easy to navigate through.

In Windows Media Center, there are two important buttons that you’ll be frequently working with - the “Start” button and the “Back” button. The Start button provides instant access to the top level menu and the Back button lets you navigate up through the current menu tree.

This holds true with Portable Media Center devices as well. You’ll find dedicated “Start” and “Back” buttons on the S60. To navigate the menu structure, the S60 comes with a four way directional rocker and a center button to select actions.   

The Start menu consists of the following categories (and yes, you Media Center folks will be familiar with this already):

• my tv
• my music
• my pictures
• my videos
• my radio
• my settings

Portable Media Centers were designed to work hand in hand with Windows Media Center PCs. Hence if you have television content recorded on your Media Center PC, you can easily sync this content onto your gigabeat S. The same holds true for all the other categories.

Before I forget, the S series uses version 2.11 of the Portable Media Center system which introduced several enhancements over the original PMC UI. One of the cooler features was the introduction of the Twist user interface (which yes is also seen on the Microsoft Zune but that’s only natural considering the Zune is based on the PMC). With the Twist UI, you have menu options lined up horizontally across the top of the screen as well as menu items vertical down the screen. This concept is heavily used on the S series and you know what? It works quite well folks.

Let’s show off some of the UI elements.

my tv

When you click on “my tv”, you’ll get a screen similar to this.

 

Television shows are displayed in a vertical fashion with different sort options available across the top. You can list the television shows by name or by date - whichever is more convenient for you.

When you select a television show, you’ll see additional information associated with the show - such as the description, title, and when it was recorded. Note - “my tv” is really only relevant for those with Windows Media Center PCs and even then, only people who are using their MCE systems to record television shows. If you have a regular Windows XP system and you are syncing television shows recorded using some other method, these shows will be shown within the “my videos” category instead.

Here are some additional snapshots of television shows being played on the S60 (note that videos are always displayed in landscape mode)

my music

Under “my music”, you can view your music under the following sort options:

• by artists
• by playlists
• by songs
• by genres
• by albums

The PMC UI makes heavy use of the album cover art which is synchronized to the player via Windows Media Player application. For example, when you click on sort by artists, you can select “The Cure” and see a list of all the albums (and their respective thumbnails) under their band name.

You can select an entire album or a specific song for playback. Alternatively you can also add songs to a quick list which can then be played back later on.

While you’re playing back songs, you can press the navigational buttons to get to additional song options such as viewing the album cover, viewing the track progress, and adjusting settings such as shuffle, repeat, equalizer, and purchase.

my pictures

When you click on “my pictures”, you’ll get a screen similar to this.

 

As you can see, you can sort photos by folder or by date.

Photos are organized into folders - each with a unique title. When you click into a folder, you’ll see thumbnails for all the pictures stored within the folder. You can also start a slide show of all the pictures at any time - even have music playing in the background.

Once you begin viewing digital images on the S60, you’ll quickly realize how nice the LCD display really is. Unfortunately the gigabeat S suffers from the same problem as the Zune in that it doesn’t fully utilize the screen space to the best of its ability. Portrait images are not rotated to make use of the display space but rather are kept in the same orientation as landscape images. Bummer.

You can press the navigational buttons to bring up additional menu options such as zooming in, shuffle pictures, and setting transition times.

my videos

Under “my videos”, you’ll see a list of all the synchronized videos that are not considered television shows by Windows Media Player. Videos can be sorted by name, by date, and by source.

Unless you have native WMV video content, your videos will undoubtedly get “converted” into the proper format usable by the gigabeat S. Conversion is handled by Windows Media Player which is convenient for the average user but the process takes some time - especially on single processor systems.

The gigabeat S handles 4:3 source videos quite nicely but 16:9 videos are squashed unfortunately during playback. Here’s an example of “40 Year Old Virgin” playing on the S60.

 

my radio

There’s not a whole lot to say with regards to the “my radio” feature except that - yes you can listen to the radio with the gigabeat S. You can tune into stations and then store them as presets on your PMC. The gigabeat S allows you to create two separate groups of FM presets - each with up to 30 presets. I think that’s more than enough don’t you?

Here are some additional snapshots of the radio section.

 

my settings

The ”my settings” section is where you can personalize the settings on the gigabeat S player. My settings breaks down into the following categories:

• music
• pictures
• video
• display
• effects
• international
• reserve space
• restore original settings
• information
• Harmonics

Here are snapshots of the various sections for your viewing pleasure.

Synchronizing Content

Unlike many other portable media players out on the market, you need to use Windows Media Player (10 or 11) to synchronize content with the S60. Depending on your content needs, this can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Here we have screen shots of using Windows Media Player 11 beta on Vista RC2 to synchronize content to the gigabeat S. Simply connect the player to the PC and watch Vista automatically install the appropriate drivers.

 

You’ll then see the following setup wizard.

To sync content to the S60, you simply select the item you want on your player and then add it to the Sync list. You can also setup Windows Media Player to automatically sync specific content to the gigabeat S whenever the device is connected.

 

On the audio front, the S60 supports MP3, WMA, WMA Lossless, and WAV audio file formats. On the picture front, the S60 supports JPEG images. Finally, on the video front, the S60 supports WMV file formats which means all other formats need to be re-encoded via Windows Media Player.

Yes that’s annoying if you have a large number of video files in a format like DivX or XviD. This means that if you plan on watching these videos on the S60, you’ll be spending quite a bit of time re-encoding files into the supporting format. If you have a multi-core processor system, then this isn’t as much of a problem but single processor systems will suffer somewhat.

 

If you’re an owner of a Windows Media Center PC, you’ll also be able to synchronize recorded television shows straight onto the S60. Once the S60 is set up with a Windows Media Center PC, you can select which shows you’ll want as well as how many of the last N number of shows you plan on synchronizing. By default, Windows Media Center will sync the last three episodes any show you’ll want to sync with the player but you can change that value. MCE will also automatically re-encode all television shows that are going to be synced with the S60 even when the S60 isn’t connected. This results in a faster synchronization process because you won’t have to wait for Windows Media Player to re-encode the shows during the synchronization process itself (unless the television show was JUST recorded).

I did encounter one small problem during television show synchronization - for some reason, I could not sync my HDTV shows with the device. I’ve yet to find a solution for this problem.

Before I forget - users of Windows XP Media Center 2005 and Windows Media Player 10 should check out this page at Microsoft. There you can download the Windows XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility which will tell you which MPEG-2 are installed on your system and which ones are compatible with the synchronization feature of Windows Media Player.

The good and the bad with the S60

After months of usage, I can truly say that the Toshiba gigabeat S60 is a pretty darn good media player. Let’s go over some of the pro’s to the S60:

First off, the device is extremely well manufactured. I’ve dropped the player a number of times and not a single problem resulted from that. The back side of the player has a comfortable metallic feel while the front side has a nice glossy finish which appears to be fairly resistant to scratches.

A major reason for the success to the S60 is due to the interaction between the PMC User Interface and the design of the controls for the S60. Everything actually makes sense on this player - something that we’re not used to all the time with Windows based devices. iPod users will still claim that certain tasks take one too many clicks to perform and to that end, it’s true. However, one quickly gets used to the extra clicks and things actually do appear quite intuitive overall.

The gigabeat S has a beautiful screen folks. Yes it’s small but the resolution is good for its size and the displayed colors are vibrant. I wish it was easier to import videos to the player and yes, I do wish the display was a bit larger for watching these videos.

Audio playback on the Toshiba gigabeat S is extremely clear and there’s no discernable distortion whatsoever (although the bundled headphones stink). Go get yourself better headphones than the bundled ones and you’ll immediately see how good the audio quality is. One of the cooler features of the Gigabeat S is the support for WMA lossless files.

Video playback worked well although the sync process is a bit annoying - especially with the transcoding process for files that are not in WMV format. If you have a Windows Media Center PC and you’re syncing television shows, you can have your PC automatically transcode the shows after they are recorded. Then the next time you sync your player, the synchronization process is much faster.

Finally, I didn’t really test this feature but you can output the video from your gigabeat S to a television set using the packaged A/V cables. This is a great feature to have if you want show your media on a bigger display.

Everything sounds good right? Well there are some problems.

We’ll start with the battery life. It stinks folks. Although Toshiba claims the player averages up to 12 hours of battery life for audio playback, I swear it’s less than that on average. I typically get about 6-7 hours of battery life during the daytime at work before having to connect the AC or USB cable to the player. Of course, the more you use the user interface, the faster the player’s batteries get drained.

Don’t even get me started with battery life during video playback. You’ll be lucky if the device lasts two hours during video playback - not exactly what you want during a cross country flight.

Video encoding support is the other major problem on the device. The S series supports the Microsoft WMV file format (although you still might need to reencode the file to fit the video characteristics of the device) but everything else needs to be transcoded into the proper file format for the player. Transcoding takes time and lots of CPU cycles which means you’re best served with multiple processors.

Summary

The Toshiba gigabeat S series is probably the best implementation of a Portable Media Center device out there right now. The hardware and software user interface is easy to use, the device feels comfortable in the hand, and you can pretty much operate the entire player with a single hand. Having 60GB of hard drive space also helps - especially if you have loads of content to sync.

Some of you may hate Windows Media Player but that’s what you’ll have to work with in managing and syncing your multimedia library. Windows Media Center PC owners will love the tight integration with the gigabeat S. There’s nothing like having television shows right on your portable device.

Honestly - this would be a near perfect device if it were not for the battery performance. What I wouldn’t give for an additional 10 hours during audio playback and 2-3 hours during video playback.

If you don’t care about battery performance, then definitely consider the gigabeat S series - especially since the player is compatible to the vast array of PlaysForSure websites out there.

Finally, do you need yet another reason to consider the gigabeat S? Well if you do, then let me just mention the price. The S30 is now selling for $249.99 while the 60GB goes for $299.99. Not a bad price at all considering what you get with it. If Toshiba would only fix the battery performance.

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