Blog entries about Tip or how-to

The Spb folks have just released their online portal, Spb Online. Three other reviews have already been published (some hours ago) on it. Therefore, I've paid special attention to elaborating on issues not discussed in the other reviews, particularly when it comes to comparing Spb Online to the competing alternatives – after all, I've published several articles on several areas Spb Online implemented: radio and TV streaming, podcasting and multiplayer games.

See THIS for more info.

 

You may remember my previous article on playing back RMVB (RealMedia Variable Bitrate) videos on Windows Mobile. Back then, the only hack available was pretty much useless: it only ran on Marvell (ex-Intel) Xscale CPU's and delivered a really inferior performance (very low video speed, useless for watching anything).

Sprint has finally officially announced the HTC Touch Diamond and HTC Touch Pro. The Diamond will be available this month and the Pro in October. This is the first appearance of this new generation of devices in the U.S. In this column I’ll point you to a to a great review (including a video) and info on these new devices, as well as a review of the Samsung Omnia and mention some free PDFs that you can download to help you get the most out of your device.

I've updated the following tutorials / bibles:

The Multiplatform Lyrics Bible (info on the just-added lyrics-displaying capabilities of Conduits Pocket Player 3.7)

Listening to or watching podcasts is great fun. If you think they are boring, meaningless or can’t entertain you during, say, a long fight, you’re wrong. For example, watching all the clips of X-Play, played back on my VGA HP iPAQ 214 (thanks to Smartphone & PPCMag / iPhone Life’s Hal Goldstein for the gift!) could entertain me for long-long hours.

It was a long time ago that Smartphone & Pocket PC Mag discussed Doppler on desktop. Neither are other articles (like Podcasts on a PDA...) up-to-date either, let alone covering all the current podcasting / podcatching solutions for all the three mobile operating systems I (currently – don’t forget I’ll also support iPhone when I get it!) support: that is, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Symbian S60.

Compared to the capabilities of desktop multimedia players (see for example the excellent WMP vs Winamp vs iTunes vs MediaMonkey for more info on their capabilities), the mobile ones certainly lack when it comes to fetching, searching for, editing, storing and, in several cases, even accessing / displaying different kinds (album art and/or other images; textual genre / composer / title etc. info; lyrics etc.) of information in audio files.

The built-in Windows Media Player has always suffered from a major flaw: it didn’t support resuming the song from the last position after restarting the player. XDA-Devs forum member Wolfman-XP (the same guy that has also developed AVRCP support for GSPlayer) has fixed this: he has released a plug-in that remembers the last position where you press(ed) the Pause button.

Following is an update to my previous article on the CPU usage of the audio player applications. Please consult the old article on how the data should be interpreted.