Creative Unveils New Media Player

Creative Technology today announced the launch of Creative ZENR X-FiR digital media player for music, video and photos, featuring Xtreme FidelityT X-Fi audio technology. The ZEN X-Fi uses X-Fi CrystalizerR audio technology that improves music quality. It does this by restoring the highs and lows that were lost during ripping to MP3, WMA or AAC formats. Creative is including a set of premium EP-830 in-ear earphones with every Creative ZEN X-Fi. "We're very excited to achieve this breakthrough of adding our X-Fi audio technology to a ZEN player, setting the highest standard in audio quality for portable music players," said Leonard Yap, Associate Marketing Manager for India, Creative Labs Asia. "Some of the top recording artists in the music industry are very outspoken about the poor quality of digital music. We addressed the issue of the poor quality of digital music by inventing X-Fi technology, which restores the quality of music that is lost during the digital ripping process, and now for the first time ever we've been able to implement this technology in a ZEN." Other features include built-in speaker, X-Fi Expand to move and expand the sound forward, SD card slot , 2.5-inch TFT display,  FM radio,  built-in microphone and Creative Centrale application for organizing, CD and playlist creation, and transfer of a wide variety of video formats, including WMV, AVI, MJPEG, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4 and 5 and XviD. A range of accessories will also be available, including docking speaker system, leather case, silicon skin to protect the player, armband and a three-pack of screen protectors. The Creative ZEN X-Fi (8GB) is priced at Rs.13,599.

Upgrade MP3 and MP4 player firmware, how to

s1fwx (s1 firmware extractor) is a free commandline tool (public domain) which lets you extract the original firmware from your s1 mp3 player device plus additional futures support operations on the firmware files like decrypt, extract and archive. this way you could investigate all the files included in any fw file, change their content and put them back together.

There are two known archive formats:

AFI: this archives include files needed to flash the device, a minimal set may consist of an BRECFxxx.BIN (the bootloader) and a FWIMAGE.FW file (as below)

FW/FWI: firmware image files include all firmware files needed during runtime

Commandline usage:

  usage:     s1fwx {i|x|s|a|l|f|r} {filename{:[afi|fw|enc]}}    examples:     display file info                s1fwx i fname.ext     extract firmware file            s1fwx x fname.ext     generate script from file        s1fwx s fname.ext > new.script     create firmware file by script   s1fwx a new.fw:fw < def_fw.script     create afi file by script        s1fwx a new.bin:afi < def_afi.script     list entire content of any file  s1fwx l *.bin     extract firmware from player     s1fwx f dump.bin     repair dumped firmware files     s1fwx r dump.bin 

You may need admin-rights to extract firmware from your player.

How To Extract and Repair Firmware?

Extracting your players firmware is a very good idea just to create a backup of the original firmware files. It's no promise that you could always backup your player after some bad firmare update, but at least you have some more possibilities.

First download newest version of s1fwx from the link provided at the last of this post and extract the archive.

Then connect your mp3 player device to your computers USB port and wait until it gets detected.

Now double click the extracted file "extract.bat" or run "s1fwx f dump.bin" from the windows commandline console. Skip the disclaimer by pressing space and select the drive your player gets mounted to. (eg. if detected drives displays "<x>" then choose drive "x:" by pressing x)

Now s1fwx should start extracting your firmware, this may take arround 10 seconds.

If everything went well and no error gets displayed it will display the content of the extracted firmware file as it was redden from your player.

Before you could update your player with this firmware file using the original "Mp3 Player Update Tool" you will first have to repair it.

Start "repair.bat" or type "s1fwx r dump.bin". A backup will be saved at "dump.bi$" automatically and the repaired file is now available as "dump.bin".

Notice that its not possible to do a firmware recovery with this file (only regular firmware updates) since there are missing files needed by the "Mp3 Player Update Tool" recovery mode. Since this files couldn't be found on your player you will need to get them from some official firmware file which is known to work with your players hardware.

Either you first could recover to this firmware before updateing to "dump.bin", or you could insert the needed files from the original AFI file into "dump.bin" using s1fwx. The original firmware has to support your flash chip(s). It doesn't matters if its just using different backlight or key-mapping. 

Extracting Firmware

Here some example how to extract the whole content of the AFI file "firmware.bin". Place firmware and s1fwx in one folder, open commandline console (run "cmd") and go to the folder containing the files. To extract the AFI type "s1fwx x firmware.bin". Then make a sub- folder "md fw", change "cd fw" and extract the firmware files using "../s1fwx x ../fwimage.fw". Now you should have extracted all the files usually included in some general firmware file. 

Details @ http://blog.ekendraonline.com/2008/01/upgrading-mp3-player-firmware.html

Dual SIM Mobile Phone from Intex

Intex, a company known better for computer peripherals like keyboards, mice, PC cabinets, webcams, etc, has recently entered the hot mobile phone market. The company recently launched a dual SIM card phone, the IN 5050. Phones that can take two SIM cards, hence allow you to be on two numbers simultaneously with one phone have slowly gained notice thanks to a slew of models crudely referred to as 'China Phones' in the grey market. The new model from Intex, however, combines CDMA as well as GSM. Thus, you can benefit from lower tariffs of CMDA and at the same time, have a GSM connection as well. The screen has a modest 176x220 pixel resolution and measures 2.2 inches diagonal.

It works with GSM 900/1800 and CDMA 800 networks. The rated talk time is upto 160 minutes and standby time is rated at upto 130 hours. Other features include a 1.3MP camera, Bluetooth connectivity, FM, and playback of MP3 and MP4. The phone is priced around Rs. 7,500