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SCMP Reporter

Hong Kong-based MC.Founder (Technology) launched a new multimedia entertainment product for hand-held Pocket PC devices this week. The product includes music videos and Chinese-language books.

The company's first product, ME Volume One, consists of nine Canto-pop music videos by artists such as Andy Hui Chi-on and Kelly Chen Wai-lam, and 12 Chinese e-books. It comes preloaded on a 64 megabyte Secure Digital (SD) memory card.

ME was soft-launched in Hong Kong as a bundled free gift with the Compaq iPaq H3850 three weeks ago, but it was officially released last Friday.

MC.Founder managing director Josa Yung said the Pocket PC platform was better suited to delivering multimedia content than competing mobile devices such as the Palm Operating System.

'Pocket PC . . . enables the running of video and audio content with high quality in sound and picture,' he said.

The video content runs at a speed of 220 kilobits per second.

Desmond Cheng, general manager of product development, said MC.Founder's compression and transmission technology created high quality audio-visual content.

The company said it received positive comments on ME.

MC.Founder will use ME as a test product to judge the demand in the market for mobile entertainment on removable media.

'The SD card is just one of the transmission paths,' Mr Cheng said. 'After consumers are used to the mode of mobile entertainment, when 3G services roll out, they will start downloading content over the air with it and view it with our streaming technology.'

The company said it had been considering hosting a portal for users to download and buy content.

The next volume will be available in three months.

'Future content may range from financial magazines and e-books to movies and interactive games,' Mr Yung said.

Although users can already use the Internet to download, compress and load the content on their PDAs, Mr Cheng said the higher quality of his company's products would attract customers.

'We did the R&D [research and development] and fine-tuned our technology with the device,' he said.

The company said it managed to compress files by 80 per cent to 90 per cent, allowing a 90-minute movie to be stored on a 128MB SD card.

Mr Cheng said content could be run at a speed of 300kps using future 3G services.

'We believe that the online streaming application in ME will be very popular among wireless operators,' he said.

MC.Founder is 40 per cent owned by Hong Kong mainboard-listed EC-Founder, the e-business flagship of red chip software-maker Founder Holdings. EC-Founder is the local distributor of the iPaq and Nokia mobile devices. The company said it had no plan to offer multimedia products for Pocket PCs of other brands like NEC or Hewlett-Packard.



MC.Founder puts music in your pocket