My first impression of the Blue Raven MediaMate was made by the size of the device.It’s 8 inches wide, 4.5 inches tall and 1 inch deep and the screen diagonal is 7 inches.For me this is huge, and it wieghs 1.5 pounds.But besides this, it’s a decent road trip PMP and you can get it for the price of $379(along with 40GB space) or $429(with 80GB space).The Blue Raven company was known before for its affordable iPod and PSP accessories and for the laptop and iPod battery replacements.
The MediaMate 7000 device is theyr first video player.And for a first effort it looks really good.It’s made form plastic with an with an aluminum backing.The front of the player is slightly recessed, to prevent from scratching.Another feature of the package is the 29-button IR remote, in wich you can get all the controls that are on front of the player.The controls on the remote are more intuitive than the ones on the layout, instead of a 4-direction control, you can find directional the horizontal control on the left side and the vertical control on the right side.This can be frustrating sometimes because when you want to push the Enter button you might hit the Up button.You can find on the MediaMate 7000 almost all the features that you can get from a widescreen PVP: a video player, video recorder, MP3 player, voice recorder, photo viewer, a text viewer, but you won’t get a FM radio.But that’s not a big deal, beacause I think you will use this device in situations when you’re in a car, or a plane.You won’t need a radio with you, because you have already got one there.It also includes the 3 flasj memory card slots SD, MMC, MS all in one, so you can import the memory content directly on the player’s hard drive.

The MediaMate 7000 has a 7-inch screen( it is a TFT LCD) that can display 16.7 million colors at the resolution of 480×234.The device comes with a leather case in wich you can keep it in, an AC adapter, car charger, AV cable and coupler, and the generic earbuds.The MediaMate includes in its package a built-in DVR by way of a 2.5mm super minijack AV connection. You can find a button on top of the gadget and with just a press of a button you can start recording with a high-quality resolution of 720×480, 30fps AVI file.You can record under lower resolutions as well. The Media Mate’s screen displays at a resolution of 480×234 and the TV output displays at 720×480 so you can play the video through the TV with a higher quality.You have favourite tv shows that you might miss along the week? Well this isn’t a problem with this device.You can schedule the DVR recording times, so you can watch them when you have spare time.Also you can set bookmarks in the video files so you can resume the video after you get back from your lunch.If you are one of the persons who always ripps and downloads music to his PC and then transfers them to the MediaMate you have to see if the compatibility suits the player.But for your sake its compatible with MPEG1/2/4, AVI, DIVX, XVI, and WMV formats or even the files ripped from the DVD will work.You can transfer only 2GB of files.

The gadget includes a MP3 player and photo viewer that are useful. The MP3 player supports only MP3, WMA, WAV and OGG formats. The MediaMate has a warm sound quality and the most noticeable attention was paid to the stereo separation. But, given its bulk, price, and its inability to sync to the Windows Media Player, I think that no one will buy the MediaMate only for the music playback.It’s also used for the movies, especially with the action-packed blockbusters ( you can hear the bullets whizing past your ears).The battery are life rated at only 4 hours for video and 10 hours for music listening.Also you can buy a extra batteries for the price of $40.