“As mentioned last week Microsoft have launched a new Podcast – Windows Phone Radio. The first episode has been made available to listen to in the last few minutes. This podcast comes in the lead up to launch of Windows Phone 7. This new podcast hosted by Matt Akers (of the Zune Insider Podcast) and Brian Seitz. This episode runs for 15-minutes. The official write-up for the Podcast states: “Windows Phone Radio is the place for the latest news and information from the Windows Phone team at Microsoft. Your hosts Brian Seitz (@brianseitz) and Matt Akers (@skipdeez) will track the people behind the news and broadcast on location from around Microsoft campus and industry events.”

Interested in hearing more from members of the Windows Phone and Zune team? Then tune in to this new podcast – you’ll find it in the Zune Marketplace, and perhaps other podcast directories.

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QuickList:

System/OS/Device Requirements: Windows Mobile 5 & 6
Price: $29.99
Company: Kinoma, Inc.
Download here or grab the free trial here.

KEY FEATURES

• With Kinoma Play, smartphones have digital media functionality that meets and even exceeds what users expect on their personal computers. Kinoma Play does more than access a user’s local video, audio or pictures – it also includes a built-in content discovery system, Kinoma Guide, the most comprehensive catalog of the freshest, most diverse mobile media content. Kinoma Play provides on-demand access from your phone to an unparalleled range of content:
• Local files – Play the music, video, pictures, panoramas and audio books on your phone
• Media services – Share your Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, and YouTube accounts between your phone and computer
• Internet – Explore a terabyte of constantly updated, free streaming podcasts, music, radio stations and audio books from thousands of providers including AOL Shoutcast , ClearChannel, CNN, NPR, Reuters, TUNED.mobi, and SomaFM.
• Home PC – Access the gigabytes of music, video and pictures on your home PC from your phone – both on-demand streaming and download
• Streaming podcasts – Instead of tediously downloading and syncing, podcasts stream on-demand, so users are always up to date
• Media First user interface – When viewing photos, listening to music, or watching video user elements all-but-disappear to keep the focus on the media
• High quality YouTube – Kinoma Play provides high quality YouTube video by playing the same feeds delivered to your PC, when bandwidth permits
• Integrated search – Search your phone, your home PC and the internet to quickly find what you want
• Menu pod – A beautifully animated dynamic menu providing fast access to many powerful features

CONCLUSION

This software is really slick looking — just check out the screenshots yourself! It offers plenty of free streaming podcasts, music, radiostations, and audio books which makes it a huge winner in my books. Well worth the price!

RATING (out of 5)

SCREENSHOTS

In the beginning, there was an awesome media player for Windows Mobile called ‘BetaPlayer‘. It could handle all kinds of audio and video codecs that the mobile version of Windows Media Player couldn’t. Eventually BetaPlayer turned into TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player), a freeware media app. And it was truly awesome. Then, all of a sudden, TCPMP dropped support for files downloaded from iTunes for legal reasons, and TCPMP became a little less useful. From this, the commercial CorePlayer was born. CorePlayer allows developers to collect some revenue and pay licensing fees for proprietary codec support.

I’ve been using CorePlayer for quite some time now and I love it. It does everything I want it to do: movies, video clips, audio files, YouTube, podcasts, JPGs, FLV files… and tonnes more.

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QUICKLIST:

System/OS/Device Requirements: Pocket PC 2000, Pocket PC 2002, Pocket PC 2003, Pocket PC 2003 SE, WM5, WM6, WM6.1
Price: $29.95 ( 20% off for the month of November with coupon code “WMCoolOpen”!) Free trial also available.
Company: CoreCodec, Inc.
Download: Available at our store for only $29.95!

KEY FEATURES:

• YouTube support, with built-in browse and search
• BlueTooth Stereo (A2DP) and Remote Control (AVRCP) support
• Programmable Hotkeys
• Supports over 15 Languages
• Media library (Manage your RSS Feeds, playlists, podcasts, bookmarks)
• Podcast Support (Standard and Enhanced)
• Streaming support (HTTP, UDP, RTP, RTSP, RTCP, SDP, Unicast, Multicast)
• IPTV/DVB-H/DVB-SH Ready
• Audio: MP3, WMA, AAC, MKA, WAV, OGG, Speex, WAVPACK, FLAC, MPC, AMR, GSM, ADPCM, ALaw, MuLaw, MIDI
• Video: WMV, CoreAVC� (H.264), AVCHD, MKV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 part 2 (ASP), DivX, XviD, MJPEG, MSVIDEO1
• Images: JPG (420, 422, 440), BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF
• Containers: FLV, Matroska�, ASX, ASF, TS, PS, M2TS, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, MPEG-4, NSV
• GPU support: Intel 2700g, ATI Imageon, Qualcomm QTv
• CoreUI / Universal Skins (Custom interface)

VERDICT:

There are a number of ways to watch YouTube videos on your mobile phone, but CorePlayer is the coolest and easiest way I’ve found, hands down. It uses minimal memory, runs very smoothly, the mp3 player shows album art, allows both mp3 and aac equalizer usage, and it can play back 700×600 DivX avi files without dropping any frams which is very cool.

The only problem I actually encountered with it was that the download did not include a help file, which would have been very useful. But there are plenty of resources online that provide help and CoreCodec themselves offer an email helpline to those in need. So it’s not all bad news on the help front.

RATING: (out of 5)

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