WM Professional media players test

Free ones:

Slide 2 Play (S2P)

One of the most impressive functions of iPhone’s music player is Cover Flow, which allows you to view your music collection by simply swiping your finger over the large album. Thanks to Slide 2 Play  this awesome interface is now available on every Windows Mobile Professional device. The last version of the application is offered in two variants – for QVGA and VGA displays, but you can still use it with a WQVGA (240x400) one, like in OMNIA.

The interface and the controls are identical to the iPhone’s and are very convenient. Nevertheless, there are some bugs which still need to be addressed. For instance, if you have a few songs from different albums in the same folder, only the first one (in alphabetical order) will appear. It would be great if the album information was taken from the ID3 tags of the files and appeared as separate, despite being in the same place. Accelerometer support is not present either, but landscape view is still utilized and switching is done in a very clever way; simply run your finger across the screen in the direction you want and voila, you are in Cover Flow mode!   It’s also nice that you are able to control the player using the D-pad.

Basically, this is the best and player in terms of options and design, and an added bonus is its price…free!] There still are no extras such as an equalizer, but its creator (A_C at xdadevelepors) often releases updates and we expect functionality to be continually added.

Mort Player

Although not as effective and convenient as S2P, the Mort player offers many options and a few variants for different skins. Like the PC application Winamp, skins completely transform the player and influence everything from album art display to control scheme. There are various visualizations (showing the playlist or minimized to only a quarter of the screen), as well as different sound effects and the option for manual adjustment of the equalizer.


Unfortunately, Mort Player is kind of ugly, not very intuitive and you’ll need time to get used to it. Also, bear in mind that it doesn’t appear in full screen with WQVGA displays.

Paid:

FlipSide

This player has been entirely designed with the album art in mind. If all of your songs are tagged correctly you’ll be able to enjoy their covers as well. If not, the only thing visible will be a large icon with a note. The good news is that the information and the order in which the artists and the albums appear is taken from the file, and doesn’t depend on the folder they are in. The covers take almost the entire screen, and switching to another music compilation is done by running your finger across the screen. Unfortunately, this transition is very choppy in phones with slower processors or less memory. In addition, the play/stop visualization and the progress bar are rather ugly.


You can organize your songs in playlists, but an equalizer is not present which is somewhat annoying since you have to pay $19.95 for the application. However, the Flipside player has an Ace up its sleeve; it provides fast access to the artist information of the current track courtesy of last.fm. The same source notifies you of upcoming concerts and similar groups which is a nice extra but doesn’t have a very useful application on a cell phone.

Vito Audio Player

VITO’s advertisements announce that it is targeting  users sick of rummaging through the various options and switching between different modes. Basically this is a greatly simplified player, almost to the point of being crippled. It will not let you easily jump to the next track (you’ll have to FFW it manually) or play a random song in the playlist while listening to music.


You are probably wondering why should you pay $9.95 for this application. There are a few nice functions such as the bass booster and the “start where you left it” feature, but overall it’s not worth the money.

Simple Tunes

The very name of the program hints that this is a very simple music player. It has been fully optimized to operate without a stylus and resembles the design and the controls of an iPod. It looks quite easy to use, but unfortunately the songs cannot be sorted and cannot be organized in playlists. You’ll need to place all files in the same directory in order to make them easy to play. However, when there are multiple files this is not convenient at all. This is a serious problem which makes using the player pointless to a certain extent. On top of that, phones with WQVGA resolution will not display the player on the entire screen.

Is it worth the $20? Definitely not.

Electric Lobster Tunes

Lobsters are a strange and expensive (to consume) species, and so is the player named after them. It consists of two parts; one is installed on the phone and the other lets you create a multimedia server on your PC. Afterwards, if you have good connection, you’ll be able to listen to music from your computer no matter where you are. The idea of the program is great, but its interface is not very  friendly to use. In addition, setting up a media server is a hard task. 

The application uses a lot of traffic and it should be combined with an appropriate data plan (with many MBs). Electric Lobster Tunes is priced at $19.95.

Pocket Player

If you have no fear of a player full of options and features, you’ll like this one a lot. You have three different views of the songs when listening to them, the ability to sort tracks by artist, album, style, year and contributing artist. You can create your own playlists as well. The interface is very fine and is easy on the eyes. Moreover, in addition to the multiple presets the offered by the equalizer you can store your own custom EQ setting. The crossfading effect is also available, and the entire Pocket Player can be minimized while you are doing something else.



If all that is not enough, Pocket Player also adds a video player (similar to Windows Media) and podcast functionality. The ability to use classic Winamp skins (.wsz files) is very cool, but since they are not intended for a mobile phone resolution they do not visualize correctly and interfere with the controls. Nevertheless, we dare say that this is the best paid player, priced at $19.95.

Resco Pocket Radio

Have you ever wanted to kill some time by listening to some music, but not have any loaded on yourdevice? Well, if you have a decent internet connection and Resco Pocket Radio, you’ll never be in a situation like this. Resco has a simple but user-friendly and beautiful interface, offering access to numerous radio stations divided in categories such as Electronica, Hip-hop, R&B, Soul, Pop, Rock and many others. You can even add your own stations. Right next to each of them you’ll see the quality (the bitrate) of the tunes and their format (MP3, OGG).

Resco Pocket Radio can be yours for $19.95.

Free ones:

TCPMP

Despite an ugly interface and having support discontinued some time ago , TCPMP is still one of the best video players out there. The main advantage it has is the support for DivX, XviD, MKV videos and the little amount of operational memory it requires. With additional plugins it can even play AC-3 and FLAC files.


The player fails to run on some phones, the OMNIA for example, and since development has ceased there will be no support for future formats. TCMCP is still a great solution used by many in the Windows Mobile community.

Paid:

Core Player:

This is the commercial version of the TCPMP player with support for the latest models and built-in codecs. Its interface is quite good-looking and codec support is still pretty impressive: AVI, DivX, XviD, ASF, MPEG4 and Matroska (.mkv, .mka). High resolution displays (720х480) are not a problem either, and as long as the phone has a fast processor you’ll be able to watch quality video. During our tests with Samsung OMNIA and i-mate 6150 we had no troubles, but with the HTC Wizard playback was too choppy.


Core can also be used as a decent music player with good album art visualization and many options. Add the built-in YouTube support and you’ll realize that the price of $24.95 is fully justified. There’s a free Beta Player application with open source that is expected to come out soon, supposedly, the successor of TCPMP.

Kinoma Play

The main idea of this brand new offering is to combine all the multimedia features of a phone, allowing you to listen to music, watch videos and view photos through the same player. What makes Kinoma Play different from the rest is the support of streaming audio and video from sites such as Digital Podcast, YouTube (including the option to upload your own videos) and ShoutCast. Another handy extra is the built-in picture browser compatible with Flickr, Google and Yahoo images. The interface is well designed and relatively easy to use without a stylus. It also offers an effective transition when opening the menus.



Unfortunately Kinoma Play has limited codec support,far behind Core Player. You can’t watch DivX, XviD or MKV videos which is a serious drawback. That makes Kinoma Play suitable for people interested in web based multimedia, but not in watching quality video. It has the highest price of all the applications mentioned in this article - $30.

Conclusion:

The choice of a multimedia player is actually a very hard task. We think that the free applications are good enough to satisfy the needs of most consumers, but some advanced users may appreciate the extra polish or file support only found in some paid players. Luckily every player we reviewed gives you a trial option, allowing you to form your own opinion before laying down the money.