I fell in love with the prior version of Pocket Player back when I started using the Sprint Mogul, and wanted to write a review, but the folks at Conduits Technologies asked me to hold off until this version was released. That hasn't stopped me from enjoying the product in the mean time, but the good has gotten even better with the latest release... adding a little polish and a few more bells and whistles. In this review, I will cover what I like about the product (the old and the new), and also what has been added in this release. So even if you've used it before, there should be new information for you in the review.

I want to start at the obvious beginning question... why add software to your PDAPhone to play media when Microsoft has already given us Media Player... which unlike much of the pre-loaded software has seen many updates over the years. In my case, my quest for an alternative began when I bought a Sprint Mogul and found that it was running out of available RAM every time I used Media Player. The Mogul is very limited on RAM to begin with, and Media Player pretty much kills it. I also found that on that device, video playback was choppy with Media Player, and its feature set was a bit lacking. So I looked at 3 or 4 alternative players... tried them for a short period of time, and then moved on. The one that stuck with me was Pocket Player. To give you an idea how much more efficient Pocket Player is vs. Microsoft's Media Player... I did a little test on my AT&T Tilt, which has twice the RAM capacity of the Mogul. After a soft reset, if I start Media Player and load a playlist of all my loaded music (about 10 CDs worth of songs, hardly excessive), I find that I have less than 10M of available RAM remaining. If I do the exact same exercise with Pocket Player, I have over 60M of available RAM remaining. So the answer for me is, "Just say NO to Media Player". But if that isn't enough, Pocket Player does so much more than Media Player, and now we'll get to that.

Out of the box, when you start Pocket Player you get the following screen, loaded with your last selected music. Optionally, you can have it automatically begin playing when it loads, but I like to control the start of playback.



But the initial screen is quite functional, but kind of boring. But Pocket Player has a number of display options including various skins and visualizations. The default visualization is "album art", which ironically doesn't show in its default configuration above. A quick tap of the screen, however, cycles through the visualization choices. The one shown below gives an image of the album art for the playing music, and a small "spectrum analyzer" visualization up top that is active. You should note that the album is missing the guys head... that isn't anything that Pocket Player did.



While that last view is pretty cool... I like to see the album cover... that was available in the last version of Pocket Player. New in version 3.5 is this next choice which is my favorite visualization, a full screen album cover view. It is adaptable to all devices and display configurations (portrait, square and landscape), and now displays the artwork as well as the current position in the track. The song, artist and album name are prominently displayed, as well as the current rating of the track.