Japan’s Sega Toys division plans on releasing a watch with media player built-in. The watch, called Digipod Trek, is capable of playing music and video, displaying pictures and recording voice notes. It connects to your computer via USB and contains a speaker for sound with a headset jack on the side.

The toy will sell for $130.

Cowon, in an attempt to entice prospective buyers to take the plunge, has lowered prices on just about every member of their PMP line. This goes for the F2, D2, I7, Q5W, A3 and U5 models. Only the O2 escaped a price cut. The cuts range from $10 to $70 off of MSRP. For a full list of new and old prices, click on the link.

South Korean tech company Mintpass has released their Mintpad, a digitized note taker. The gadget allows you to take and share notes on the fly, using a fully-functional touchscreen. In addition, the Mintpad has WiFi, a media player, 1.3-megapixel camera, microphone, built-in speaker and 4GB of memory with microSD expansion. The 320 x 240 touchscreen measures 2.9-inches of pure note-passing goodness.

Currently, the unit is only available in South Korea for about $156. No word on when it will legitimately reach these shores.

I’m sure other vendors would argue with Thomson that the A1 is the world’s smallest media player, but they’ve definitely gone small at 3 inches and 87 grams. Still the unit has can play MP3, WMA, WAV, and AVI, has a 16:9 display, comes in 4GB and 8GB flavors, and even sports an FM tuner. Pricing in China will be equivalent to $106 for 4GB and $120 for 8GB. No word yet on wheter Americans will ever get a chance to lose an A1.

Media players in personal computers are the current vulnerable spot which can allow unauthorized access to your computer. So says David Thiel, senior security consultant with iSEC Partners, at a recent Black Hat hacker conference.

"The actual potential for attack is reasonably severe because nobody cares about actually playing videos from YouTube or playing music on Web pages – you can’t get music to stop playing at you," he said. "Because this stuff is launched automatically, I think the impact could be significant."
"This is the next logical place to attack," Moss said. "People know not to open strange documents, but they click on MP3s all day long."

The hope is now that these findings have been published, the companies will find the flaws in their players and patch them quickly.