Review: Pocket Tunes Deluxe

As electronic devices mature, they take on more features and improve the features that they already have. With flash memory prices doing the opposite of gas, more and more people are using their mobile phones as multimedia devices.

Love it or hate it, Windows Media Player is the default music player on Windows Mobile Phones. While Microsoft has done a good job integrating the desktop version of Windows Media Player with its mobile counterpart, some people prefer a music player with more features (or less Microsoft).

Normsoft has traditionally been a developer of software for the Palm OS, and was founded in 1999 by Tim and Gerald Norman. Pocket Tunes (their flagship product) is the first product that they have ported into the Windows Mobile world.

Design

Pocket Tunes is a pleasure to look at and a delight to use. The graphics and icons are clean and intuitive. The interface is full screen, with a clock and battery meter built in (meaning you don’t have to leave the program to check your battery status or look at the time). Downloadable skins allow you to customize the application to your desired look and color. The Smartphone version allows you to use both the interface buttons and the menu to control playback.

Ease of Use

The Pocket Tunes interface is clean and easily understandable. The 5-way buttons are mapped to the most commonly used functions (Play/Pause – Ok, Volume – Up/Down, Next/Previous Track – Right/Left). Keyboard shortcuts also exist to allow you to quickly navigate throughout the application. If a call comes in while your music is playing, the music is paused for the duration of the call and then resumes once the call has ended.

Synchronizing your music from your computer to your mobile device can be done with Windows Media Player on your desktop or with the included Pocket Tunes Sync for iTunes (you can also copy the music files manually to your media card, which appears to be the only choice for you Mac users). Pocket Tunes Sync allows you to choose play lists to sync, and lets you choose whether to sync automatically when you connect your device.

Quality

Whenever a new product arises for the first time, I tend to handle with care. Pocket Tunes worked flawlessly on my Samsung BlackJack (which is in the list of supported devices), but not so well on my Dell Axim X51v (it has a VGA screen, and the interface was displayed in the top left quarter of the screen). Update: Looks like the problem was a corrupted skin file. After re-downloading the VGA skin, everything worked perfectly on the X51v as well (dude, I'm liking this on a VGA screen). I would definitely recommend that you use the 15 day trial to make sure that you don’t experience any issues before you purchase Pocket Tunes.

The sound quality is actually pretty decent (while I don’t consider myself an audiophile, I do have pretty high standards) even while using the built in speaker on my BlackJack. One of the many preferences that are configurable is a volume boost, which will allow you to multiply the volume by up to 32x without a noticeable decrease in sound quality.

Features

While not overloaded with features, Normsoft covered most of the basics when developing Pocket Tunes. Album Art is supported, as well as a very usable library feature which allows you to find your music (or Audio Book) within a simple drill down interface. Bluetooth headphones and their associated playback buttons are also natively supported (in the Palm OS version of Pocket Tunes, another application is required). Sony’s HBH-DS970 Bluetooth Stereo Headphones (read the full review here) worked perfectly with no tweaking required.

One of the cooler features is the built in support for Internet Radio. Pocket Tunes includes over a hundred preset Internet Radio stations covering a wide range of genres. The ability to add your own stations to your library also exists, but cannot be done through the library (one of a couple apparent interface oddities that I found, another is the skin chooser and skin preferences being in two different submenus).

A graphical equalizer is included and has the option of using or modifying presets, but the presets are not optimized (or even named) for specific genres out of the box. Gapless playback and the ability to cross fade are also available.

One of the features that I found to be missing from Pocket Tunes at this point is Podcast support (as mentioned in Dieter’s news post about the release). The idea of Podcasting is so prevalent on the Internet that I would think this would be a no brainer. There are also some features (sharing Internet Radio stations over Bluetooth or email for example) that are available in the Palm OS version that are not available in the Windows Mobile version.

Conclusion

As a whole, I really liked Pocket Tunes. There were some things that I saw as being incomplete or missing, but I felt that the feature set was good enough that I could use it on a daily basis without bumping into any limitations. The interface was clean and intuitive, while still allowing users of both the Professional and Smartphone (touch screen and non touch screen) flavors of Windows Mobile to have access to all of the features. The fact that both stored music and Internet Radio are supported makes this a good choice for users without much memory or those without a data plan.

If you are looking for an upgrade to Windows Media Player, you should at least give Pocket Tunes a try. With the 15 day trial version (and a 15 day guarantee), you’ve got nothing to lose.