Jason Dunn
12-15-2005, 05:00 PM
<i>I wrote this off and on during the sessions at the recent Mobius 2005 conference. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness, so you'll have to forgive me if it tends to ramble a bit, or switches tense. I had hoped to have this published sooner, but after my flight home was delayed by 5 hours which got me into bed by 3:30 AM, the next few days were a bit of groggy write-off as I tried to dig myself out of a mound of email and tasks. I didn't write about every session - I took bits of pieces of what I found interesting and relevant.</i><br /><br />I'm down here in lovely downtown Seattle for Mobius, a conference that Microsoft puts on every 12-16 months for a mix of mobile device community leaders, journalists, and analysts. Full disclosure: it's an all-expenses paid trip (hotel + airfare) for most of us, though some people paid their own way, and we always end up getting some goodies to take home and play with. The real focus of Mobius is to bring together the leaders of the top mobile devices communities and Web sites, to show them what Microsoft is up to, and to have discussions with them about the mobile space. Since the Windows Mobile group at Microsoft includes the Portable Media Center (yes, it's a Windows Mobile device), one session at Mobius was devoted to the PMC. Here's what I learned about the next-generation of devices.<!><br /><br /><span><b>Portable Media Center v2</b></span><br />According to Pete Bernard, Group Manager, Portable Media Centers represent the "tip of the sword" – most of the innovations that Microsoft is creating around media comes from this type of device, and the enhancements make their way down to Pocket PCs and Smartphones. For the next generation of PMCs, they focused on several things: making the devices cheaper, giving consumers more choice through giving the OEMs options for differentiation (FM tuners, recording radio, PVR functionality, DVB-H tuners, more CODECS, etc.), making the devices better photography companions, ensuring that the devices look better (improved industrial design), and focusing on content – enabling premium video content, and creating a single content portal to drive consumers to the content they want for their devices. That's a big list - I wonder how they did at achieving all those items?<br /><br />New devices will have user interface extensions that allow OEMs to add new menu items. OEMs will also be able to distribute new CODEC support via Flash ROM updates. This is a great update, because it means that even though Microsoft isn't shipping a DivX CODEC on the device, if Creative Labs wants to, they could – and after the fact at that. The lack of popular video codec support is a huge issue with these devices, so this helps address that.<br /><br />The issue of video transcoding was brought up – Pete said that there's a new transcoding engine coming that moves from a 1 to 1 ratio of time to transcode to a 4 to 1 ratio (meaning you could transcode a 60 minute video in 15 minutes). There were no specifics on when this would be released – I have a hunch it's something we'll see in the Vista timeframe. That would definitely be a welcome improvement, but ultimately what we really need is for Windows Media Player to run as a system service so it can transcode content in the background if needed - or no transcoding at all with better native file support.<br /><br />I routinely shut down Windows Media Player when I'm through with it, and it's irritating to have the "Video is currently being converted, do you want to stop?" error pop up. Also, if Windows Media Player was a system service, then it would have a much better chance of discovering new music added to monitored folders (this design flaw bugs me to no end).<br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Camera Companions</b></span><br />Next, they discussed the camera companion feature. I was initially excited about this feature, but the implementation leaves a few things out. Cameras can connect directly to the PMCs using USB 2.0, or use memory cards (CF or SD, depending on the hardware). The photos from the cards can be copied over, and when the process is complete the user is presented with an option to erase the card if they wish. What the process lacks, however, is any sort of data verification. If I'm going to copy over a memory card with 400 photos, I'd want to know that the photos on the device are a bit-for-bit copy of what's on the card before I select "Yes" to the delete option. When I brought this up they said the concern was making the process longer and thus having a negative impact on battery life.<br /><br />I think the real bottleneck is the speed at which the images can be copied off the card, so adding a second thread doing bit verification wouldn't seem to be that much of a drain on resources. Still, this is a much-needed feature that will add another dimension to the ways a PMC can be used. I believe they also mentioned that when the images are copied over, a copy is made and resized to 320 x 240 for optimal performance. Your original photos are kept at full resolution elsewhere on the PMC. I wonder if the 2x zoom only works on the resized photos (which would be useless) or if it also works on the full resolution images.<br /><br /><span><b>Other Enhancements</b></span><br />The photo browsing experience has been improved – they've added pan and zoom at 2x so you can examine your photos more closely, photo browsing by date, and an improved thumbnail grid view. All in all, these features will allow users to find the photos they want easier than before, which is a good thing.<br /><br />Pete handed around several Portable Media Center devices, and all had tape over the brand names so we couldn't see which device was which. I'll say this much: there's finally some variety! We saw everything from a small iPod-sized unit with a square screen to a much larger widescreen unit with a 16:10 ratio screen. There's definitely some innovation in the hardware now, which is great to see.<br /><br />There was some discussion throughout this session and others that the media playback and browsing interface on the PMC is so vastly superior to the hodge-podge of Windows Media Player 10 Mobile and the Pictures application in Windows Mobile 5. Interestingly enough, WMP10 Mobile used to be developed by the Windows Media Player group, but it's not under the roof of the PMC team. So odds are good we might see some version of the PMC media access interface on Pocket PCs and Smartphones. I think this would be a welcome move because it's so much faster at getting to the content you want to see/watch/hear. We'll see!<br /><br /><span><b>Where Are the 307,200 Pixels I Want to See? </b></span><br />My one concern though is that everything is still QVGA - 320 x 240. None of the units have VGA screens, which makes them lag behind something like the Creative Zen Vision or the Dell X51v Pocket PC, both which have VGA screens. When I pressed them about the lack of VGA, the reluctance to move to VGA seemed to stem from three factors: cost, performance, and battery life. VGA screens are expensive, they push 400% more pixels than QVGA, chewing up CPU cycles and battery power, and the more I research the Zen Vision (I was keen on buying one) the more I understand how they were able to sell it for $399 with a VGA screen: they picked a cheap VGA screen. Every review I've read complains about how bad the screen is, especially at off-axis viewing, and the PMC guys don't want to compromise the user experience - but they do want to get the prices down to a different level than the first generation units, which means QVGA.<br /><br />I'm confident that I'll pick up one of these 2nd generation PMCs, but the question is which one - it will be nice to have a choice when the time comes (which sounds like Q1 2006). It's a pity that they'll miss the holiday buying season, but let's hope it will be worth the wait.<br /><br /><i>Jason Dunn owns and operates <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.</i>