Zenum Organum: Shiny, tiny and slimliney

Swiss company Zenum, in an effort to exceed the video iPod's style, has hired its own 'name' designer, Jaren Goh, and set him the task of designing a fashionable portable music player, and it's called Organum. It's one of the most beautifully slick and glossy MP3 players we've ever seen and it'll give the iPod's aesthetics a sincere run for its money.

The Organum is still in development and won't be released until the end of the year, so we're working with the first list of specifications. We know it'll have 2GB of flash memory, a 128x160-pixel colour screen, a built-in microphone plus JPEG and, oddly, BMP photo support. It'll play MP3, WMA and WAV format music, but we don't know anything about whether or not it'll support DRM-protected music purchased from online music stores. Most non-Apple players do, but we don't want to commit ourselves to something unconfirmed.

One interesting point to note is that the company's Web site calls it the 'Organum MP3/MP4 Player'. The inclusion of 'MP4' hints at video support, as MP4 is a popular video compression format for portable devices, but with only 2GB of memory and no confirmation as to the display type, we're unsure whether the final model will feature support for video. Music can be compressed in MP4 format, which is probably what the site intends to convey, but the site doesn't list MP4 as a supported audio format. The bemusement shall continue until we hear more from Zenum.

Crave is eager to hear more details about this stylish new player and you can rest assured you'll hear more about it as soon as we do. We would like to see a model with higher capacity, though -- 8GB would be lovely, but 4GB would suffice. Either way, it's a refreshing design and one we can't wait to check out first-hand. -NL