Disney: the company that brought us Snow White, Bambi, and the Mix Max Personal Media Player...? Yep, Disney is targeting pop-culture-savvy kids with an upgraded version of its media player with more memory; it's also introducing a smaller player, the  Mix Micro, and the multimedia Mix Max Player, which will play movies, music and television shows and display photos. 

Disney media will come on small preloaded memory cards, but the Mix Max will also play your own movies and music. The player will come in a number of color schemes and Disney themes, including the floral-themed Tinker Bell, as well as the customary ice-blue and silver-chrome unisex models. Bundled with the Mix Max, Disney will be shipping stereo earbuds and a wrist strap so the kids (uh huh, don't pretend like you won't use it too) won't drop it as they jam out to tunes from "Aladdin" and "Beauty and the Beast."

If Disney material doesn't do it for you, the device (with a 2.2-inch color LCD) features 512MB of internal SD memory, upgradeable to 2GB; it can store around 240 songs and 5 hours of video. Speaking of video, your movies or TV shows will stream at a respectable 30 frames per second, but only in WMV format. The Mix Max will also play onlyMP3 and WMA music files, but can be used to download music from any Windows Media DRM 10 content provider via USB.

To keep the kids busy on long drives, the Mix Max ships with a rechargeable battery that Disney claims will offer 2 hours of constant video playback and up to 8 hours of audio playback.

Disney will offer the Mix Max Player for $99.99, but there is a catch: Those wonderful Disney movies will run you a cool $19.99 each, so keep that in mind when you budget this out. Look for the Disney Mix Max this October.

Post by Don Reisinger