i-Station T4 HD PMP offers 1080p playback

Despite some impressive entries from companies like Archos, Cowon and most recently Viewsonic we’re still looking for what is arguably the Portable Media Player to end all PMPs – an iPod for the widescreen video market, if you will. While waiting for Apple to get its act together with its own tablet-style device our heads were turned at this year’s IFA by i-Station’s latest effort in this market, the T4 HD.

The front of the slim, white exterior is rather sensibly taken up by a 4.3” touchscreen display but, disappointingly, it only offers 480x272 resolution – by contrast, Archos’ year-old 5-series Internet Media Tablet offers a 4.8” screen at 800x480.

This seems all the stranger when you consider that it’s allegedly capable of handling 1080p video files via an HDMI 1.2 output and, while this would be beneficial on the big screen in itself, we’d expect better localized support to round things off.

Still, the T4 has a few more tricks up its sleeve with built-in 802.11b/g wireless and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, a range of capacities from 8 to 32GB and healthy file support that includes MPEG1/2/4, MKV, H.264, DivX, XviD and WMV video formats.

Hot off the press from this year’s IFA, we’re yet to hear more about the intricacies of the T4’s feature-set or performance and though it’s only available in Korea at present, expect it to reach Europe in November for EUR199 (USD$285) for the 16GB model, before making its way to the US for January 2010.