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You may remember that a while ago, LG attempted to make DJing into a handheld thing with their DJ phone thing. Yeah right - like we bought that idea by the warehousefull right? Not. And they never sent one here anyway so it was probably pants. But here is a device that fits in your hand, acts like an iPod but actually sounds like it really can achieve the handheld DJ experience. People - I give you the Pacemaker.

The Pacemaker is essentially a 120gig music player with a colour screen - nice. But it's considerably more than that. Built into this is the ability to fully mix your music using conventional controls - crossfading, EQ, pitch and looping. And all can be monitored just like a full sized mixer before releasing to master output. I asked the creator Jonas from Tonium in Sweden just how it's done:

As you know, if you are mixing with a full scale DJ-system, you have two decks and a mixer. Beginning your set you would start playing a track on the first deck and set the mixer to play it out on the speakers. Then you would most likely tend to the other deck and arrange with the next track, listening to it in the headphones as you set the cue point and appropriate pitch. This is all done in the same time as the other deck is playing the first track, and you are not touching that deck so you really do not need it...

This is the basic invention and patent pending idea of Pacemaker®; one can say that it is one deck with buttons that make it switch between two. So if you press channel button 1, it is deck 1 you are controlling. And analogue with that: if you press channel button 2, it is deck 2 you are controlling.

The loop function builds on the magical Pacemaker® P-button that switches all of the buttons into controlling the advanced features. The fast backward button switches to being loop in and the fast forward button switches into controlling the loop out point. To exit the loop, hold the P-button and press the CUE-button (looking like >< if you have seen the images), to re-enter the loop, hold the P-button and press CUE once more.

The crossfader works in a very similar way. There is one crossfader that switches between the headphones and the lineout output.

So it seems like there's some handheld interface juju at work here. I'm sure it'll take some getting used to but it does actually seem workable. I'm especially interested in the looping function and will be forwarding some ideas to Jonas about this as well.

If you all pop over to the official Pacemaker site this weekend, I'm sure everything will be revealed. In the meantime, have a scan over this explanatory PDF. Launch is looking like Autumn.

And no - I don't know the price.

And does it look like you put a sodding Pro X Fade in it?