A Hard-Disk based Portable Entertainment Device for Managing Contents on the Go

This paper presents a design and implementation of a hard-disk based portable entertainment device based on an ARM-based system for managing thousands of personal photo/music/video collections anywhere you go. This device is designed as a music-centric entertainment player, slideshow player, digital photo storage and video player with built-in metadata database to sync and manage the contents. There are many obstacles during the design of such devices e.g. managing large content, intuitive user interface design and power consumption on hard-disk access. To overcome these design issues, a prototype system has been presented in this paper with a player called photo jukebox (PJ) at client side and a digital media manager system on the host computer. Hardware and software architectures of PJ are presented. Also, an iterative process of user-centered design is applied on this device. Therefore, the ease of use of its user interface was investigated using the human computer interaction (HCI) methods of heuristic evaluation and usability testing. At last, the dynamic power management is explored by different user profiles to enhance the battery life on such devices. Key-Words: Human computer interaction, Graphical user interfaces, Metadata, Content management, Photography, Hard-disk, Power management