We all remember when Victorinox announced a Swiss Army knife with USB flash memory built into it, right? They've taken it one step further now, slapping an MP3 player onto their handy little knife and calling it the s.beat.
It's a logical step to take, given that they'd already engineered a knife with flash memory - one of the key parts of an MP3 player unit (the memory, not the knifey bits). We've seen some tiny MP3 players surface over the past year or so, and the s.beat is indeed a small one. This is in part thanks to its lithium polymer battery which doesn't need to be externally accessed for changing and is, of course, rechargeable.
MP3, WMA and Vorbis encoded files are supported, so reasonably good file format support can be had. Plus, the capacity of the device is up to 2GiB; about the limit for a device this size.
The appearance of the device, especially the remote, might put a few people off, but no doubt a number of people will like the idea of a Swiss Army MP3 player and so Victorinox will have no trouble selling these. At least you'll be able to trim your nails and listen to music with the same device; now that's a weird concept.
