Joe is a very interesting device. With enough memory, touch button control, bright screen and a recorder, it is a very interesting MP4 player.
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As odd as it may sound, there are many thinnest MP3 and MP4 players out there. Every company that makes those miniature devices and cares about its name has "the world's thinnest player". The most recent one is called CVSJ-1304-4GB (yes, yes, recognizable name, I know) and it can be found on the pages of Chinavasion.
If you put four credit card on top of the other you'll get 4.5 mm, and that's the thickness of Joe. I'll call it Joe because I can't learn that ugly name. Where I'm at it, I must mention that Manufacturer Reference is G9536FUECW82. The guys are obviously from China, and cryptic reference may mean that they learned the job working for some big company (Apple?) and now they have enough knowledge to start their own business.
So, if you have enough room for four credit cards, and I presume that have at least four of them, then you have enough room for Joe. The dimensions are related to credit cards, too: 85x54x4.5 millimetres. Inside that small beast there's 4GB of internal flash memory on which you can save files in MP4, MP3, WMA, ASF or WAV format at bit rates from 32 to 320Kbps. That's good. There is also a built in microphone that records sound in WAV, although it would been better to see recording in MP3. For radio fans like me, there's an FM radio.
The 1-inch display has the resolution of 160x128 pixels and it has many colours. How many, I don't know, they didn't published it. For file transfer from your computer to Joe there's USB 2.0 ili 1.1, and its software supports Windows 98SE and later, and MAC OS 9.2 and newer. If you read this you certainly can read English, but if it's fun for you, you can choose another language: Korean, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Czech, Danish, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Thai, Romanian, Greek or Hebrew.
On the earphone output you'll get two times 5mW that goes to your headphones via 2.5mm jack. That's not the common standard, but it was necessary to slim the jack down. Should it been standard, our Joe would be fat. Five or six credit card, I think. Joke aside, the non-standard jack may be a problem if you are not close to a electronic store.
All in all, Joe (CVSJ-1304-4GB) is a very interesting device. With enough memory, touch button control, bright screen and a recorder, it shows us that we may expect many exciting device from China in the future. We hope that they will have better names. ■