Windows Phone Thoughts: Listenin' to the Music!--PocketMusic 3.0 Reviewed

Streaming Audio
Now this was something new for me – I had never hooked up my Pocket PC to an Internet radio station before. Fortunately, Pocket Mind provided excellent ‘how to’ instructions in their documentation, and everything went without a hitch. After connecting my Pocket PC through to the Internet through a Bluetooth connection to my laptop, I was able to download the playlist files worked a jazz station from Seattle, open it up and listen quite contentedly for the next 3 or 4 hours. It was really quite cool. Unfortunately, I can’t do this at work, since tying up of bandwidth with streaming video or audio is frowned upon, corporately.


Figure 9: Listening to Steaming Audio.

I also wasn’t able to test out accessing any Audible book material, since I don’t have access to any of these files. But the documentation gives a good description of how to access these. I’ve also heard through the grapevine of some problems with Audible.com’s Pocket PC version of their player, so maybe this would be a workable alternative.

Documentation
One of my complaints with the 1.2 version of PocketMusic was the lack of documentation supplied with the freeware version. Well, Pocket Mind has addressed this with a short 3 or 4 page document which is included in the distribution package. It describes the basic functions of PocketMusic.

With the PocketMusic ‘bundle’ however, comes a more extensive document (about 27 pages!) which describes all the available functionality and even provides guidelines for developing your own WinAmp skins for PocketMusic. And it’s written in a straight-forward, friendly fashion, without a lot of jargon included. As I mentioned above, I was able to follow the instructions to get streaming audio to work through PocketMusic the first time!