Okay, show of hands. If you’re a Star Trek fan, how many of you have a phaser toy sitting on your desk right now? Yeah thought so. Some of you may have gotten the Trek Communicator VOIP phone. But how many have gotten this cool Trek gadget … a Trek Tricorder Media player?! You heard me. Someone has built a Tricorder that not only looks like one, but works like one as well. Sort of.

Ameralis Grafx‘ Tricorder PMP-09 seems to have gotten all the details right in creating a replica tricorder from Star Trek the Next Generation series. Handheld, about the size of a pregnant iPod, it flips open to review power, play, rewind, forward and volume buttons and a 2.8” LCD screen which does double duty as both a menu interface and movie screen. It has 8 GB of on-board memory (no sign of an SD expansion slot, sadly), and a life of between 4 hours for video and 12 hours of music before needing recharging. The PMP-09 has working lights and sounds from the hit sci-fi series, has the standard LCARS interface (you trekkers know what that is) and plays AVI, MP3, MP4, and WAV files. It’ll even serve as a digital photo album with capability to display both JPG and BMP files.

The PMP-09 comes in six different styles from standard Starfleet issue, to Medical, Marine, and Borg models. Borg models?! But it’s not cheap. Figuring that if you build it, they will come with their VISA cards, the PMP-09 will set Trek geeks back between $350-430 bucks. Yikes.
Check out the Tricorder in action over at YouTube here.

Hat Tip – Engadget