Music went portable half a century ago courtesy of the transistor radio and has become more personal and portable over the last 25 years thanks to the Sony Walkman and Discman and then MP3 players. Video is poised to do the same thing with the arrival of the first portable multimedia players, led by the dazzling Archos Video AV320 ($599.95 direct). Now you can watch a video recorded from virtually any source, anywhere.

What is the AV320? Imagine an Apple iPod on steroids, one big enough (4.4 by 3.2 by 1.2 inches, HWD) to hold a color LCD, so you can watch video as well as play audio. The silver case contains a 20GB USB 2.0 hard drive (you can get the 40GB AV340 for $30 more), and the device, which uses a Linux operating system, can record, store, and play back MPEG-4 video, MP3 music, spoken audio, and JPEG photos. At 12 ounces and 17 cubic inches, the AV320 is just under twice as heavy as a 30GB iPod and a little more than twice as bulky. The multimedia player is both dazzling for what it does well and maddening for what it does clumsily.