[Seattle PI] The hand-held devices, called Portable Media Centers, will store and play back video, music and photos. The company had originally hoped to see at least one of the devices on the market during the recent holiday season, but the first release is now expected in the second half of this year.

A Portable Media Center with a 40-gigabyte hard drive is expected to hold up to 175 hours of video, 10,000 songs or 100,000 pictures, using Windows Media audio and video files.

I hope there’s an SDK available for these. If so, it might give my iPod a run for it’s money.