What's Online

Mobile content is any type of media formatted for and delivered to mobile devices. It includes music; movies; TV shows; news, sports, and weather reports; eBooks; audio books; and more. The concept has been around since before the Pocket PC was introduced in April of 2000. There's been an explosion of mobile content offerings this past year—so many that we could never cover them all in a single article. Instead, I'll highlight some of the more interesting solutions to give you an idea of what's available.

Take your TV with you!

Perhaps the sexiest offerings in the last year relate to mobile TV. When I covered this subject in one of my weekly online columns, one of my readers dumped his Treo 650 and went out and bought a Windows Mobile Treo 700w just so he could watch TV on his device via Slingbox. He e-mailed me to tell me he was delighted with the result.

Orb Networks (http://www.orb.com): This service is not only amazing, it's free. Orb lets you access the media content that is stored or hosted on your PC from an Internet-connected mobile device. After you register for the service and install their software on your PC, it indexes your media content—including TV, video, pictures, music, and more—and uploads that index to the Orb servers (with strong guarantees of privacy). Once this is done, you can use your mobile device's Web browser to access the content index displayed in your personal "My Orb" area on their Web site. Tap (or select) any item in the index and Orb will stream the content from your home PC to your device, wherever you are. Orb will even stream live TV if your PC is equipped with a TV tuner card and connected to a cable or satellite service.

A few months ago Orb came out with an update that added a bunch of new features that clearly indicate this service is going beyond streaming media and adding an impressive array of goodies. These include things like AccuWeather, video sharing, the ability to upload your contacts and access them from anywhere, access to your bookmarks or favorites, support for adding custom Internet radio and Internet TV channels, and more. We published a more thorough review or Orb in the September 2005 issue (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/_archives/sep05/streammedia.aspx).

Orb is a free service that lets you stream media content from your PC to your mobile device.

Slingbox (http://www.slingmedia.com): This device connects to your TV and makes all of your TV channels and TiVo-style recordings available to you via the Internet wherever you are, be it another room in your house or a hotel room in a distant city.

The list price for the device is around $200, though I've seen it at http://Buy.com for $175. In addition to the device, which connects to your TV, you'll need to download and install SlingPlayer Mobile ($30) on your Pocket PC. A beta version of SlingPlayer Mobile is now available for the Smartphone. SlingPlayer is also available for Windows 2000/XP PC.

Unlike Orb, which streams content from your computer, Slingbox simply connects to your TV and makes its content available on the Internet via streaming. You can use the SlingPlayer software to control your TV and TiVo remotely. For example, you can be staying in a hotel and use SlingPlayer to set your TiVo at home to record a TV program, and then watch it remotely the next day via SlingPlayer on your PC or Windows Mobile device.

SlingPlayer Mobile lets you play TV streamed from a Slingbox, on your Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone.