ARICENT's mobile terminal products. He has organised and chaired several technical sessions and gave tutorials on "Mobile Device Architecture: Present and Future", "Digital Living Network Alliance", "Fixed Mobile Convergence" at various international conferences and symposia. He has been involved in several international Research Projects related to mobile communication systems. Anand has 18+ years of experience and has published more than 10 research papers at major wireless international conferences - WTS, WWC, WWRF, IMSAA and COMSWARE, engaged academic institutions for Research Projects and filed 2 software patents.

VIJAY ANAND is excited about the possibilities of Next-Generation Portable Media Player and explains how NGPMP with extended support of technology like DLNA makes it possible for consumers to transform their home into a "connected planet" and thereby revolutionise entertainment in mobile devices… Electronic devices, especially Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), notebooks, mobile phones are gaining increasing importance in our day- to- day lives. These equipments come along with a host of features like e-mails, document reader, office utilities which are targeted towards a specific category of consumers like business executives. However, analysts forecast a paradigm shift in the usage of these gadgets - asprimarily to be entertainment and by a vast retail market. This has resulted in a new trend emerging in the hand - held devices segment and in effect aligning with this changing market environment.

Next Generation Portable Media Player (NGPMP) reveals the key market expectations in this new global entertainment arena. NGPMP is also aimed at enhancing the lifestyle of consumers by empowering them to enjoy digital content (e.g. music) anytime, anywhere and on any device too. Some of its salient features can include offering Instant TV on DVBH (Digital Video Broadcasting), Personal Video Recording (PVR), listening and recording on FM Radio, photo viewers, e-learning, games and many more. NGPMP with extended support of technology like DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) makes it possible for consumers to transform their home into a "connected planet" enabling the user to watch recorded TV or Internet content anywhere in their living space.

NGPMP can also provide the consumer some of the existing services in wireless domain like Wi-Fi to support Web browsing from the backyard or in his DLNA- connected personal network. NGPMP, to showcase itself, can make the overall experience a pleasurable one by offering exceptional video quality with resolutions up to 1920*1080. This alleviated with DivX for audio delivery creates a home-theatre effect envisioning the "connected home planet" a reality.

NGPMP in an attempt to intensify picture quality, to say 15-20 mega pixels, can effectively utilize the incredible features like image enhancement, edge detection and image upscaling up to 720p delivered by some of the next generation platforms from silicon vendors. NGPMP, to outperform the existing bench-mark, may provide a swift start-up time by using the services exposed by these next generation platforms. NGPMP, to be universally acceptable, can also support other native codec formats like H.264, eaac+ and so on, to ensure compatibility with other such devices.

NGPMP can be visualized as a lean, compact sized, light weighted device offering exceptional battery life with feature support like Storage Card, Bluetooth, and GPRS enriching the host of features list. This coupled with an appealing touch screen display with applications like zooming, slideshow, music players (eg: juke box), camera are add-ons to the excitement of the user. Like most Mobile Internet Devices, NGPMP can leverage services of different operating systems (OSs) dedicated to hand- held segment to achieve these feature list.

An OS like LiMo, a variant of Linux pertaining to open source, best suits NGPMP for the rich feature set it offers at the same time significantly reducing the input cost. Also, the availability of ready-to-deploy, re-usable solutions like codecs further reduces the input cost and time-to-market while ensuring to meet global quality standards. This coupled with very high portability and a realistic integration effort looms to attract new business opportunities to launch a variety of flavors of PMP under different price ranges to cater to the vast majority in the market place.

Technology like NGPMP is receiving good attention from silicon giants like Intel, Texas Instruments and others for the reason being, a two-fold increase in the processing power of the silicon chips every year coupled with the exponential decrease in the cost of memory units assures a favorable environment for NGPMP to make its debut to break through the performance- memory constraint. With an explosive growth of hand-held devices world-wide, and the vibrant markets that are catered to them, especially emerging markets like India, in particular, adding 83 million subscribers year-on-year, with an expected total of 300 million by end of 2008, the potential for NGPMP is huge.

Furthermore, considering other emerging markets like China's 534 million subscribers, US's 257 million subscribers and Russia's 172 million subscribers, NGPMP is definitely a window of opportunity to unleash the potential revenues of this constantly growing dynamic sector. With a projected growth of nearly one billion users by 2012, majority of content providers have already triggered collaborative partnerships with OEMs and ODMs to enable services like EPG (Electronic Program Guide) on PMP to establish a revenue-based business model through instant TV. This model along with encashing on the market conditions also stimulates investment demand in areas like advertisements which are quite capable of being revenue generators.

PMP as a technology can leverage the extended DRM (Digital Rights Management) capabilities to safeguard the content provided by the user. This leads to another new area of revenue generation to the content providers by offering their secure protection solution as a service to the user. NGPMP, being both technology and market-driven, capable of yielding a promising Return on Investment (ROI) is increasingly gaining momentum as a part of strategic business initiatives among the industry leaders. This evolving technology influencing the consumer demand also creates opportunity for co-creation, synergy among the market players to propel the growth moving forward.

The future trend looks positive with the promise of revenue across sectors making it indispensable in the next generation consumer electronics space. This coupled with consumers' interest lasting for the next decade; NGPMP is an ideal candidate to embark its entry in the near future. NGPMP may also emphasise on offering features like"Gaming on Globe" through the co-existence of WiMAX and Gaming NGPMP being extensively accepted by key players like Adobe will aid to establish its presence to support enhanced features like flash games, flv codecs and so on. With exclusive support from the platform environment to develop applications, NGPMP should deepen its roots on similar lines to offer features like "anytime, anywhere, any device and any amount of data" by having applications developed using some of the packages like Android exclusively promoted by Internet giants like Google.

NGPMP, tending to be an"All-in-One" device also avails of implicit inertia among the market players. First being the pricing; an optimal price tag will definitely yield a lot more profits compared to other such devices as the input costs involved in development is surprisingly very low. Last, but not the least, the consumer interest -raising the bar- always expects NGPMP to be a "one-shop-stop" device and showing tremendous penchant towards buying it.

" Gone are the days where I-pod was the craze, Arising are the days where PMP will be the craze, Innovations are the days where products will be the craze, Revenues are the days where business will be the craze. " A crazy quote on NGPMP conveying the noble motive to all.