Transcend has a new MP3 player with a few extra twists to the common feature list of the average DAP, including variable speed play, E-books and help with karaoke.

The T.sonic 820 series MP3 player has the ability to transfer and play music files like most other digital audio players, formats including MP3, WMA, WMA-DRM10 and WAV. When listening to music the navigation allows you to control the playback speed and an A-B repeat function enables continuous repeating of a section of a track. There may not be a lot of applications for this other than maybe making your own personal one-time remix or as Transcend suggests this feature may be helpful in listening to a language learning track.

The T-sonic supports reading text (.txt) files and therefore displays the text to read E-books right on the 1.5 inch OLED display. Due to this text file reading abilities, lyrics can also be scrolled across the screen simultaneously with the song play to encourage a karaoke type sing-along. While this might not be appreciated by everyone, at least you’ll have the words right.

The MP3 player from Transcend also has Line-In recording which is a little more commonplace with digital audio players lately. The feature can record voice with a Line-In device or with an external microphone (no internal mic on this one). It can also record incoming FM radio with the FM tuner that’s built in and stores up to 9 stations. The recording function also has a feature that detects a person’s voice and activates recording only when the voice is present.

The T.sonic comes in two capacities, 2GB and 4GB of flash memory (Transcend is an industry leader in flash memory production), measures 82 mm x 41.5 mm x 12 mm and weighs 45g. The 1.5 inch OLED display has a pixel resolution of 128×128 and displays color photos and .mtv video files as well as displays the artist and song title in 12 available languages. A Li-ion battery provides up to 15 hours of playback on a full charge. Pricing and availability have not yet been announced.

Source [Transcend]