At the center of its colorful face plate, the Atree J2 media player has a dome-shaped controller called the “Red Eye” that you use to navigate the system’s menu system. But don’t get your hopes up that it’s as deft as the iPod’s scroll wheel. You actually move around the menus by clicking up, down, left and right on the flat plastic surface around the red eye – or clicking right in the middle to activate your selection.

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In addition to playing audio files in MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, APE and FLAC formats, the video playback can handle AVI, MPEG4 and WMV formats at a solid 30fps. The screen has a bright TFT 320 x 240 display and is designed to play video in landscape mode for the optimal viewing experience.

And with 38 hours of audio or 8 hour of video on a single charge, it’s no slouch on battery performance, either. In comparison, the similarly-priced iPod Nano can only handle 24 hours of audio or 4 hours of video per charge.

Perfect for listening to movies through headphones, the J2 has a 5.1 virtual surround sound mode. There’s even an FM tuner for listening to radio broadcasts, and a handy Korean-to-English dictionary app. But my favorite feature is the Adobe Flash Lite 3.04 implementation that lets you play a wide variety of SWF format games on the portable’s screen.

Available in either 4GB (115,000 KRW/$93 USD) or 8GB (138,000 KRW/$112 USD) versions, there’s also a microSD card slot for adding up to 8GB of additional storage. Unfortunately, there’s no word on a release outside of Korea at this point, but you might be able to find one over on eBay if you keep an (red) eye out.

[Atree via Early Adopter]

Beside looking great, the UM10 is a very capable media player, which can deftly chew through MP4, WMV, MP3, WMA and OGG files with nary a complaint. There’s also a DMB television tuner, FM radio, E-book reader and voice recorder. Not to mention the full-on personal organizer application suite which can sync with Microsoft Outlook. Plus, it’s also got Flash Lite support, so you can take advantage of those slick interfaces and games that Adobe’s flagship web app can crank out.

Oh yeah, it is a robust electronic dictionary too, loaded with dozens of books worth of definitions, synonyms, and other reference information in a variety of languages.

It all comes packaged in a slick black case, with a sliding QWERTY keyboard and beautiful 480 x 272 widescreen TFT display. The keyboard isn’t tactile though, so you’re best off using the stylus to control it. The base models comes with 2GB of RAM, but that’s expandable through a Micro SD memory card slot.

The Atree UM10 retails for 358,000 KRW (about $381 USD), and as is often the case with these types of wondrous gadget, is only available in Korea for now.

[via The Earlyadopter's World]