As Korean electronics makers grow in confidence and begin to challenge Japan's domination of the East-Asian market, so it seems they are gaining a reputation as bold as the Chinese for flouting copyright laws. The latest possible violation is a very attractive portable media player from a company named Qrio .
Although the Korean Qrio has nothing to do with Sony's now-defunct bipedal robot of the same name , it has been trading on the brand for several years, specialising in media players and miniature digital TVs. The latest Luxy G4 PMP, however, is no imposter.
Priced to sell
At 128,000 won (£70) for a 4GB player, the price is hard to beat, as - thankfully - are the styling and functionality. The most striking feature of the 62g G4 is a bright 2.4-inch colour TFT screen, closely followed by an appealing aluminium body with a reflective finish on the back.
Audio playback includes, unusually, all of MPs 1, 2 and 3 plus WMA, while Xvid is the order of the day on the video front. A QVGA resolution of 320 x 240 pixels at 24fps is just about acceptable for watching short clips on the tiny screen.
Lastly, a miniSD slot, JPEG photo playback and a simple text viewer make the G4 a very acceptable budget media player. The only downside is a weak battery that manages just seven hours of audio and three hours of video runtime.
