January 10, 2000 Web posted at: 11:24 a.m. EST (1624 GMT) by Rebecca Sykes

From...

(IDG) -- Casio has announced a wrist-borne MP3 player.

The WMP-1V Wrist Audio Player is about the size of a large, sport-type men's wristwatch and is worn on the wrist in the same way. Users can download MP3-format music to it from their computer and listen to the music through earphones that ship with the product.

The water-resistant Wrist Audio Player weighs 70 grams and is designed not to skip, even if the user is running, dancing or otherwise moving around while listening to it, according to Casio.

The Wrist Audio Player can store approximately 33 minutes of CD-quality sound

	ALSO
MP3 advances abound in Las Vegas
	MESSAGE BOARD
MP3: The new wave

, 44 minutes of near CD-level quality sound or 66 minutes of FM broadcast-level quality sound, the company said. It takes 70 seconds to download one four-minute track of music to the Wrist Audio Player, it said. This lengthy download time is one of the problems of Internet-based music that remains to be solved.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE

IDG.net home page

Make your PC work harder with these tips

MP3 portals debut

IDG.net's personal news page

IDG.net's products pages

The Wrist Audio Player is powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that can deliver approximately four hours of continuous playback.

In addition to the wrist-worn component, the Wrist Audio Player comes with stereo headphones, software to link the unit to the user's computer, a charger/communication attachment, an AC adapter and a USB cable, Casio said.

System requirements for the Wrist Audio Player include a PC running Windows 98 and a Pentium 166MHz or higher, 64M bytes of RAM, a CD-ROM drive and a USB port, according to Casio.