Pocketdish — handheld PSP/iPod Video/Palm TX competitor

The week that yielded Apple's new video iPod and the Palm TX also brought us the PocketDISH. This handheld player from Dish Network is described as a "TV/Video, music, game, and photo device." Wireless analyst Glenn Fleishman (who hasn't demoed it in person yet, neither have I) says, "Sounds bizarrely open, flexible, and useful."
Here is the consumer website, here's a press release from last week with spec details.

Reader comment: Boing Boing reader Jay Vaughan reminds us about the upcoming GamePark device, a dual processor gaming machine which runs on Linux.

Reader comment: Butch Maddul in the Philippines says,

Pocketdish looks so much like the ARCHOS Digital Video Recorder. I've got the archos 100gb and it's not pre-loaded with games though. It comes preloaded with usermanuals in pdf and some schmaltzy sample videos and music. Over-all its got an ok performance, it warmed up a bit while I was viewing the movie CRASH loaded in AVI. format. The videos accepted leave much to be desired, actually. It only plays specific vids, most of which are in the MP4,AVI and WMV formats. no support for Quicktime mov.

Reader comment: Brad Knowles says,

Yes, the PocketDish hardware is re-badged Archos. A little bit of searching on sites like Engadget and Gizmodo will turn up a wealth of articles on the devices, as well as facts like Dish investing $10m in Archos, etc. Feature-wise, compare the PocketDish AV500E to the Archos PMA400, and the PocketDish AV700E (<>) to the Archos AV 700.

Also note that Archos has 100GB version of the AV 700, whereas PocketDish does not (at least, not yet listed on their website).

The principal difference between these devices appears to be that
the PocketDish versions have built-in software and hardware to copy
content from Dish Network DVRs, whereas the Archos versions appear to
be designed to be used as DVRs in their own right.

Personally, I like the PocketDish concept better, where you have
a regular DVR at home that would be recording your favourite shows,
and then you might periodically sync that with your portable device.

However, I don't know what features of the Archos devices may
have been disabled and I'm not seeing any prices listed for the
PocketDish devices (unlike the Archos website which does list prices
for their hardware), so it's hard to say how this will play out in
the future.