Need a gift idea for the up-and-coming PVR enthusiast in your household? Look no further than this holiday gift giving tip.
We covered the Toyquest RipRoar VideoFree DVR Portable Media Player a few months back and decided it looked like a solid portable device for the youngsters.
Walmart has this "toy" for $48 on clearance with $.97 shipping, which is a pretty phenomenal price considering it cost $199 at release and can currently be found on Amazon for $126.
512 MB of internal storage (expandable by 2 GB via memory card) is probably the devices biggest shortcoming, but you have to remember this is for the kiddies.
You can cram plenty of episodes of Blues Clues or Dora the Explorer on one of these things - at least enough to keep your pipsqueak satiated for a good while, and that leads us to the units strongest selling point.
There's no downloading of shows off the web and transferring them to the unit to mess with.
The Riproar records programming directly to the unit from any video source giving you an endless supply of free content (let's just assume you steal your Cable TV / Satellite) to entertain your child with on the road.
It also includes some other nice features such as an external speaker, scheduled recordings, 5 hours of battery life for video, MP3 and photo playback, TV out, and an IR remote for controlling the unit while on the included dock. Is it wrong that this feature set sounds better than some of the real adult PMPs on the market?
At such an inexpensive price, this thing is either a seething piece of digital poo or nobody is aware of this decent looking product and as a result they simply aren't selling. At $48.97 I'd be willing to take the gamble on this one and give it a try.
This definitely falls into the "gifts that are ostensibly for my child but really for me" category, but whatever. I do what I want.
