Wolverine ESP 5160 Thinks Big

Wolverine's new ESP 5160 portable media player sports a 160 GB hard drive and a 7-in-1 media card reader...and you can use it as a DVR.

Wolverine Data annnunced yesterday that it is shipping its ESP 5160 portable media player, offering a mammoth 160 GB hard drive, a 3.6-inch 320 by 240 pixel LCD display, a 7-in-1 media card reader, support for a wide range of audio, video, and image formats…and did we mention an optional dock lets it function as a DVR?

Wolverine is positioning the ESP 5160 not only as a high-end portable media player, but as a handy-dandy backup device for photographers looking to offload their multi-megapixel images. The ESP 5160 sports a 7-in-1 media reader capable of pulling data from Compact Flash, MicroDrive, SD, MMC, Memory Stock, and Memory Stick Pro media, and comes with an adapter for xD media—and an optional adapter lets it get to MS-Duo, MS-Pro Duo, MiniSD, and RS-MMC media. Plus, the ESP 5160 supports display of RAW image files from a wide variety of pro and semi-pro digital cameras (although a firmware update may be required), as well as BMP, TIFF, and JPEG images..

But that’s not all: the ESP 5160 plays back Motion JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, XviD, and Windows Media 9 video, and can also handle MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, WAV, and CDA audio. And if you don’t have any music or video to load onto the unit via USB 2.0, the ESP 5160 can solve that problem for you too: users can record off a built-in FM receiver, and—with a $70 optional cradle—use the ESP 5160 as a digital video recorder to record video from a television, DVD player, VCR, or camcorder. The ESP 5160 has a built-in speaker (and, of course, a headphone jack), and boasts 13 hours of music or 4 hourso video playback off a rechargeable/replaceable lithium ion battery?

Intriged? The 160 GB Wolverine ESP 5160 is available now for $549.