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

Be sure to register in our forums! Share your opinions, help others, and enter our contests.


Digital Home Thoughts

Loading feed...

Laptop Thoughts

Loading feed...

Android Thoughts

Loading feed...



Wednesday, February 6, 2008

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

Posted by Don Tolson in "SOFTWARE" @ 08:00 AM


Today Screen Plugins
Both products provide a Today screen plug in which provides information about the currently playing song, as well as controls for the player.


Figure 13: Pocket Music's Today screen plugin.


Figure 14: Pocket Player's Today screen plugin.

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.


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.

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.

Sound
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 is 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.

Equalizer
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.

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.


Figure 16: The Equalizer in Pocket Music. Not too bad, but I think it could use a more polished look.

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.

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.


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.

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.

Playing Video
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).

Other Features
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.


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).

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.

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.

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.


Figure 19: Pocket Music's options menus. Pretty standard stuff.


Figure 20: Pocket Player's options menus. A lot of the really neat stuff is crammed into the 'Advanced' menu.

Conclusions
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.

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.

Don is an Associate Director with Fujitsu Consulting and leader of its Enterprise Mobility Community.

Tags:

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...

Reviews & Articles

Loading feed...

News

Loading feed...