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

User Interface
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.


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.

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.


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.

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.

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.


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.


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:


Figure 9: Here's an example of large album art in Pocket Player.

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.

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.


Figure 10: Pocket Music's default Winamp skin. Quick Quiz – where's the button to bring up the menu?


Figure 11: Here's an alternate Winamp skin, available from Pocket Mind's website, called Mozart.

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).


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.

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.

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.