Don Tolson
02-06-2008, 04:00 PM
<img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-logo.gif" /><br /><br /><b>Product Category:</b> Media Players<br /><b>Manufacturers:</b> <A HREF = "http://www.conduits.com" target = "blank"> Conduits Technologies</A> and <A HREF = "http://www.pocketmind.com" target = "blank"> Pocket Mind</A><br /><b>Where to Buy:</b> <A HREF = "http://www.mobihand.com/pocketpcthoughts/product.asp?id=3017" target = "blank"> Pocket Player </A>; <A HREF = "http://www.mobihand.com/pocketpcthoughts/product.asp?id=238" target = "blank"> Pocket Music (old version?) </A> from MobiHand (affiliate)<br /><b>Price:</b> Pocket Player = $19.95 USD; Pocket Music = Free (MP3 + Winamp only), $19.95 USD for Bundle, which includes WMA and other features.<br /><b>Specifications:</b> Both run on Windows Mobile 5 or 6. Pocket Player requires approximately 3MB of memory, while Pocket Music needs 2.9MB.[/b]<br /><br /><b>Pros (for Pocket Player):</b><br /><li>Able to handle most music <u>and video</u> media formats;<li>Finger and gesture-friendly interface for listing and selection of items.<br /><b>Pros (for Pocket Music):</b><br /><li>Supports the widest variety of audio formats, including audio books, streaming audio, and playlists;<li>Standard Winamp skins available for look and feel;<li>Finger-friendly interface with direct access to major features.<br /><br /><b>Cons: (for Pocket Player)</b><br /><li>Limited number of skins available;<li>Many controls on the player itself are not 'big finger friendly';<li>Creates playlists in your 'My Documents' folder automatically;<li>Some features are difficult to get at.<br /><b>Cons: (for Pocket Music)</b><br /><li>Seems to lock out all externally-defined hardware button functions while it is running;<li>Default Winamp skin has very small controls;<li>Equalizer degrades overall sound performance.<br /><b>Summary:</b><br />The field of media players for the Windows Mobile is (thankfully) a rather crowded one, with numerous applications available beyond the Windows Media Player provided with the operating system. Two of the more popular options Conduits' <i>Pocket Player</i> and Pocket Mind's <i>Pocket Music</i> have recently released new versions, so now seemed a good time for a head-to-head comparison of their features and capabilities. Is one better than the other? As all good consultants say, It depends...<br /><br />Read on for the full review!<!><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Introduction</b></span><br />There are many media players available for the Windows Mobile platform. Pocket Music (from Pocket Mind) and Pocket Player (from Conduits) are two of the most popular and both have released new versions in the last month or so, boasting new features and better integration.<br /><br />From a price point, both Pocket Player and Pocket Music are pretty similar and both provide many more features and functionality than WMP. But that's where they start to diverge. Pocket Player more directly completes with WMP in being a 'one-stop-shop' for playing all types of media (be it audio or video) that sits on your PPC but Pocket Player supports a much wider variety of file types/codecs. With version 3.51, Conduits has also taken the first steps to provide an iPhone-type user interface making use of finger touches and gestures for selection of media to play (more on this later).<br /><br />Pocket Music, on the other hand, has taken a different tack. As its name declares, the focus of this product is on the audio portion of the media spectrum, and Pocket Mind has expanded this to include audio books, streaming broadcasts, and a wide variety of audio and playlist formats. In its latest 5.0.4 version, Pocket Music continues to build on mimicking the iPod and providing as much one-handed functionality as possible.<br /><br /><span><b>Finding Your Music</b></span><br />Being able to quickly locate and catalog the media on your unit, then displaying it in an easily accessible structure for selection and playing, is crucial to this type of application. If you can't get at the song(s) you want to play quickly and easily, there's just no point.<br /><br />Both players have built-in search functions which can locate media files on your unit be they located in storage memory on an SD card. When you first run Pocket Player, it automatically goes out and searches the device, looking for music and video. On my Eten X500, with about 300 songs and a few videos, about 30 to 45 seconds to find and organize them all. Pocket Player's selection interface has been enhanced to allow for use of the fingers and gestures to move from screen to screen whether you want to select via genre, artist, album or even release date.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pporganizer2.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 1: A screenshot of Pocket Player's new organizer/selection interface. Note the lack of scroll bar on the right. You can either drag your finger down (or up) to move through the list, or tap on one of the letters to access that portion of the list directly. Swiping from right to left moves up one level, back to Genres, etc.</i><br /><br />Pocket Player also (helpfully) creates a number of playlists for you when it is installed (placing them in your My Documents folder), so you can see which are your favorites (played most often) or were recently added or recently released.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppplaylistcreated.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 2: Playlists created by Pocket Player upon install. I kind of wish they'd given me an option to have these created or not. However, they are small and easily deleted.</i><br /><br />Pocket Music also provides this search capability, but it needs to be manually initiated from the menu system.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmload.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 3: Like Pocket Player, Pocket Music's search for music can be configured to initiate every time Pocket Music is started.</i><br /><br />Pocket Music's search seemed to be much faster (about 10 to 15 seconds total) at locating all the songs, but of course, it didn't include the video. Trying to find a particular piece of music to play next though, is a bit confusing. The functions aren't as cleanly laid out as in Pocket Player, and they are definitely not built for one-handed or finger operation.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmmediacatalog.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 4: Pocket Mind talks up their Playlist and Media Catalog Organizers quite a bit. Since I'm not a big creator of playlists, I found trying to locate a favorite piece or album of music to play a little confusing. And this is definitely geared for stylus operation.</i><br /><br />Neither provide the synchronization features found in WMP, but this is more a function of Activesync, not the player itself. Personally, I've found WMP's Media synchronization to be more trouble than it's worth, but it seems to be the only way to transfer DRM-protected music from my laptop to the PPC and keep the licenses intact. Both Pocket Music and Pocket Player appear to respect DRM, but when I accidentally lost the licenses for some WMA files from my PPC, neither product complained. They just appeared to queue and play the song, without any sound coming out. At least WMP provides some helpful screen messages and offers to download the licenses again, although I never could get that to work.<br /> <PAGEBREAK> <br /><span><b>User Interface</b></span><br />Both products offer screens and controls that work on both QVGA and VGA screens in both portrait and landscape orientation. Pocket Player's skins tend toward more of a standard look and feel which can have the basic colour altered.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppskin.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 5: Pocket Player's Skin Selector. There are quite a few options in the dropdown, but it's mostly landscape and portrait, QVGA and VGA versions of the same thing. The colour adjust is a nice addition.</i><br /><br />Pocket Player's controls on the default skins tend to be more stylus-oriented, being too small and too close to be effectively used with the fingers.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppplaying.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 6: Here's a screenshot of Pocket Player while in operation. The buttons for running things are not as finger friendly as in Pocket Music. Note the small album art available as a visualization, in the top right corner.</i><br /><br />They say they can also handle Winamp standard skins, but it wasn't clear from the interface or the documentation as to how you would do that.<br /><br />Conduit has also added numerous features to the interface to make it look and feel much more like WMP on the desktop, including album art (large and small format) and those cool '70s-like bezier diagram visualizations. Selection of which visulazation you want is from the options menu. Unfortunately, the names aren't very helpful in deciding which one is which, but it's sometimes fun just to play with them.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppvisualoptions.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 7: Here's where you configure/select visualizations from the options menu. I think this would be better if it was a more visual interface, with dropdowns and a preview screen.</i><br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppvisuals.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 8: Screenshot example of the bezier visualization in operation. Far out, man! Where's my blacklight and that poster of a lizard in a tetrahedron? :silly: </i><br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppalbumart.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 9: Here's an example of large album art in Pocket Player.</i><br /><br />You can actually have multiple visualizations selected within Pocket Player, but only one can be active on the playing screen at once. You scroll through them by tapping on the top right corner of the screen or by selecting More/Visualization from the Menu system.<br /><br />Pocket Music, on the other hand, has much more configurability available in its user interface, supporting the Winamp standard for players. While there is a wide variety of exotic looks available under Winamp and a good number are available from Pocket Mind's website, all are definitely stylus driven.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmwinamp.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 10: Pocket Music's default Winamp skin. Quick Quiz where's the button to bring up the menu?</i><br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-mozartwinamp.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 11: Here's an alternate Winamp skin, available from Pocket Mind's website, called Mozart.</i><br /><br />It's been one of my pet peeves with Pocket Music since its inception, that some of the controls on the Winamp screens are so tiny they can't be effectively and consistently used even with a stylus! Pocket Mind has listened though, and provided their own set of skins which are much more finger friendly. (Actually, these have been in place since version 3, but this latest creation is showing more polish and intuitiveness).<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmmain.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 12: Pocket Music's default skin. Here, you can see that they have clearly thought about layout and size, to make it intuitive and very finger friendly.</i><br /><br />Unfortunately, Pocket Music has no ability to show album art or other visualizations. Pocket Music does have a 'bars' kind of visualization, which is intended to mimic the level indicators on the equalizer for each of the frequency bands. (They call it a Spectrum Analyzer) Unfortunately, this doesn't really work since the bands displayed don't correlate to the actual music being played. The beat is followed alright, but the frequencies are all off.<br /><br />Back in version 3 of Pocket Music, I noted that Pocket Mind had finally solved the problem of locking out the functions I had assigned to the hardware buttons (like taking screenshots). Unfortunately, this appears to have returned in v5, since I couldn't get any of the buttons to work as I had assigned them while Pocket Music was running.<br /> <PAGEBREAK> <br /><span><b>Today Screen Plugins</b></span><br />Both products provide a Today screen plug in which provides information about the currently playing song, as well as controls for the player.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmtoday.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 13: Pocket Music's Today screen plugin.</i><br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pptoday.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 14: Pocket Player's Today screen plugin.</i><br /><br />The one from Pocket Music is, to my mind, the better looking one, and certainly provides the easiest interface for the user. Pocket Player, on the other hand, does something quite different and unique. If Pocket Player is active and playing a song, the Today screen plugin looks pretty similar to the one from Pocket Music and provides roughly the same functions. When Pocket Player isn't active, however, it still provides an interface at the Today screen, through a Notification message, attached to the left soft application button at the bottom of the screen.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppnotification.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 15: Here's what you get when you tap on the Notification soft button when Pocket Player is active. Certainly a different kind of interface.</i><br /><br />Selecting this option displays a kind of 'mini-interface' which tells you the currently playing song and gives options to stop, skip, play, or even exit Pocket Player. Unfortunately, none of the controls are finger friendly, and there's no option to actually go back to Pocket Player itself.<br /><br /><span><b>Sound</b></span><br />I tested the sound from both using a pair of Motorola HT820 Bluetooth Stereo Headphones. I know this adds an another source of limitation from the BT connection, but unfortunately, the headphone jack on the Eten X500 is rather flaky and occasionally leads to shutting off the phone's earpiece completely. For the most part, both players do a very good job of reproducing the music and/or video as it is recorded. Aside from the equalizers (which I'll talk about separately in the section below), I couldn't discern any noticeable difference in the sound quality of either player on the same piece of music. (I suspect that all players use the same basic codecs to reproduce each of the file formats, so the only real difference is in the interface and features provided.) That said, there <i>is</i> a very noticeable difference in reproduction quality depending upon the sampling rate used against the original, and in some cases, the different codecs used. However, I find this is mostly a personal preference. Suffice it to say that if you want the best quality music, don't be afraid to go for the higher sampling rates and squander a bit of disk space. After all, storage is getting so cheap now it should be easy to acquire at least 8GB (or more) for most units.<br /><br /><span><b>Equalizer</b></span><br />Unfortunately, I have a bit of experience (albeit old) working with some of the best equalizer boards in North America. So I have certain expectations of what a sound equalizer should and should not do. While both Pocket Music and Pocket Player have equalizers with built in presets, both suffer from not really acting like their real life counterpart. When you set an equalizer to flat response (zeroes across the board) and switch it in, you should hear absolutely no difference in the way the music sounds. At flat settings, the equalizer should introduce no effects to the original sound either enhancement or reduction. Unfortunately, both products introduce sound artifacts when their equalizers are turned on.<br /><br />It's most noticeable with Pocket Music, where switching in the equalizer make the music sound like it's coming out of a tin can. I first noted this in Pocket Music v3, and it seems it's still there. Also, adjustment of the equalizer controls don't seem to be affecting the sound frequencies they are supposed to.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmequalizer.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 16: The Equalizer in Pocket Music. Not too bad, but I think it could use a more polished look.</i><br /><br />The presets provided by Pocket Music work well enough and produce effects which are consistent with their titles. Also, be careful of Pocket Music's 'extra bass' feature. While it works, it seems to do so by reducing the volume of all the other frequency bands. There was a noticeable drop in overall volume of the music when this feature was enabled.<br /><br />Pocket Player's equalizer has a less noticeable effect when it's supposed to be flat (which is a good thing), but playing with the frequency band controls didn't produce an immediate effect. I needed to adjust the sliders, then click on OK to close the screen. Then, the changes would be applied to the sound. Again, most times the changes I made to the sliders didn't really seem to affect the music in the same frequency bands.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppequalizer.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 17: Pocket Player's Equalizer. Movement of the sliders is not as smooth as in Pocket Music's, and you don't hear the effect of the change until after you tap on Done in the bottom right corner. Also note that you can't get to the presets from here.</i><br /><br />My recommendation, if you must use the equalizer, is to work with the presets only and find one that works best for you. Leave the sliders alone. Better yet, turn off the equalizer.<br /><br /><span><b>Playing Video</b></span><br />Of the two, only Pocket Player provides support for playing of video and thankfully, they've included support of a large number of video formats including WMV, AVI, MP4 and the 3GP format produced by most cell phone and PDA video camera functions. On my Eten X500, I had a bit of a problem playing the 3GPs in anything other than 'full screen, landscape' mode, but Conduits and I are talking about this. On the whole, I tried a number of formats and lengths of video clips and found that Pocket Player had no problem keeping it smooth and synchronized with the audio. (Note I didn't have a lot of other stuff running at the same time).<br /><br /><span><b>Other Features</b></span><br />Both have 'wake-up to music' alarm clock and snooze features, but I found Pocket Music's easier to find and interact with. Pocket Music puts them right up front accessible from the main screen.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmalarm.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 18: Here's Pocket Music's alarm setting, which comes up off of the Alarm button on the main screen. Pocket Player has them buried somewhere in the Options (I think).</i><br /><br />Both support suspension of music playing while you are answering a call on smartphone and WM Professional units, and resumption from where you left off after you have completed the call.<br /><br />A neat feature in Pocket Player is that there is a menu option to direct the audio output to a connected Bluetooth headset directly, even if it's a mono one used normally for phone calls only. It also remembers this setting across shutdowns and restarts of the application and soft resets of the PDA. It is possible to do the same thing with Pocket Music or WMP (or actually, any audio-producing application), by launching the program from software which opens the Headset Audio stack first, such as Voice Commander.<br /><br />Both players suffer from having so many configurable features that the Settings (or Options) menu has many tabs and it's difficult to remember where a setting is located. I find Pocket Music's tabs to be a bit better organized, but I'd still be hard pressed to tell you where to configure any particular feature.<br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-pmoptions.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 19: Pocket Music's options menus. Pretty standard stuff.</i><br /><br /><img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-jan08-players-ppoptions.gif" border="1"><br /><i>Figure 20: Pocket Player's options menus. A lot of the really neat stuff is crammed into the 'Advanced' menu.</i><br /><br /><span><b>Conclusions</b></span><br />So, which one is the better player? As I said at the start of the article, I'm going to play consultant here and cop out with It depends on what you want.. Both have virtually identical sound (when you don't use the equalizer!) If you're looking for a full-media type of player for both audio and video, then Pocket Player is the obvious choice. It can handle the most common music formats, video from either the Internet or your phone camera, and podcasts. While the player itself needs a bit more work on a finger-friendly skin, Conduits definitely seems to be going in the right direction with its selection interface.<br /><br />For those looking for the widest possible range of audio support, including books, streaming and multiple playlist formats, Pocket Music is the way to go. Its player has a good one-handed interface and it can handle almost any audio format available. The search interface needs a bit of rethinking, since it's still confusing for me and I still don't believe they've got the equalizer working properly, but the iPod-alike interface is definitely the way to go.<br /><br /><i>Don is an Associate Director with Fujitsu Consulting and leader of its Enterprise Mobility Community.</i>