Pocket PC Thoughts: Battle of the Players -- Pocket Player 3.51 vs. Pocket Music 5.0.4

Introduction
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.

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).

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.

Finding Your Music
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.

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.


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.

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.


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.

Pocket Music also provides this search capability, but it needs to be manually initiated from the menu system.


Figure 3: Like Pocket Player, Pocket Music's search for music can be configured to initiate every time Pocket Music is started.

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.


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.

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.