CES: Hands on with Toshiba's gigabeat S series MP3 players

Toshiba is a company that really ought to have made more of its MP3 players. It had a great line up of gigabeat models in Japan in 2004, but sadly by the time they reached Europe they’d been eclipsed by their rivals.

Anyhow Tosh is trying again this time with the gigabeat S series. Basically a rival to the iPod video and the Creative Zen Vision:M, the pair of models, the $299 MES30V and $399 MES60VK both sport 2.4inch QVGA screens (much larger than their rivals) play back all the usual formats (MP3, WMA, JPEG and WMV) and include an FM tuner and AV out sockets.

The difference is in the storage with the MES30V packing a 30 Gigabyte hard drive and the MES60VK featuring a 60 Gig one. Battery life is a pretty decent 20 hours for music playback. The 30 Gig models come in both white and blue while the 60 gigger is in black. All three are slated for March launch stateside which means we’ll probably see them in the summer.

We had a quick play with the models today and yep they look great and that screen is a winner. The user interface and the twist navigation system are a tad clumsy though.