The Gadgets Page

June 29, 2007

iPhone My Treo

Filed under: PDAs and Phones — Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am

iPhone My TreoI gave up long ago trying to make my Treo do all the things that Palm told me it could do. Like that playing videos with Kinoma Player thing? Yeah, good luck finding a video encoded correctly to play on Kinoma. What about playing music on it with RealPlayer? Yeah, I guess you can do that, but good luck playing just the songs from one album or by one artist. You can make your Treo make noise, but the user interface is so difficult it makes the software useless.

There is one thing that the Treo does better than the iPhone. You can connect it to your laptop and get online with it. I’ve used both of these software products and they both work extremely well.

  • PDANet – Connect your Treo to a PC computer to get online
  • USB Modem – Connect your Treo to a Mac computer to get online

The thing is, getting my laptop online is pretty important. When we were covering CES, we stayed at a hotel with no Internet access at all. We used our Treos to get online that entire week. When we stayed in Anaheim, the hotel was supposed to have free high speed wireless access, but it never once worked. We wouldn’t have been able to work at all if it hadn’t been for the Treos. Even worse, when we were at SXSW, there was wireless, but it was so bogged down by all the conference attendees that it was nearly useless. It was actually faster for me to get online with the Treo than to use the wireless at SXSW.

Because the iPhone currently can’t be used as a USB modem, it is useless for me. Sure, the video and audio features are cool. Sure, the user interface makes me drool with envy. But all that can’t hold a candle to letting me work when I’m out in the boonies. Staying connected means more than just accessing the Internet from my phone. I need a phone that can get my laptop online as well.

I put the iPhone clownfish wallpaper on my Treo, but it doesn’t make my phone play videos or music any better than it did before. Fortunately, what it does do, it does well.

3 Comments

  1. Laura, “Like that playing videos with Kinoma Player thing? Yeah, good luck finding a video encoded correctly to play on Kinoma.” Happily, luck isn’t a factor. The Kinoma Media Guide built into Kinoma Player 4 EX literally puts 1,000s of mobile-optimized audio and video streams at your fingertips. Also, you can go to mobile-savvy sites like m.youtube.com for hundreds more videos that work great with Kinoma Player. Finally, it’s really easy to use your own music, video and photos on your device and use them with Kinoma Player. You can either put them right on your flash memory card, or access them remotely with software like Orb. As far as the iPhone, your Treo with Kinoma Player will play lots of popular mobile content that the iPhone can’t. Our forum (forum.kinoma.com) and blog (blog.kinoma.com) are good resources for anybody who has specific questions about how to do all of this stuff. – Charles

    Comment by Charles@Kinoma — June 29, 2007 @ 9:29 am

  2. Charles, I downloaded the new version of Kinoma 4. You do NOT want me to compare it side to side with the iPhone. Not only do YouTube videos look better on the iPhone, they load faster, even though the iPhone is on such a “slow” network. Aside from YouTube, it’s difficult to find anything to put right on my flash memory card. The program has rejected almost every format I can save videos in. Sorry, Kinoma is STILL not ready for prime time, or even off time. Laura

    Comment by Laura Moncur — July 1, 2007 @ 8:09 am

  3. Laura, I’m glad to hear that our support folks fixed the activation key issue you let me know about Friday morning. I got your email around 10:30am, and I believe our support team got you the key within an hour. Thanks again for letting us know, so that we could find and fix the issue before it affected anyone else. “You do NOT want me to compare it side to side with the iPhone.” Why would I mind? I’ve used and like both. Although the Treo is a very different beast than the iPhone, video-wise it’s worth noting that the iPhone restricts you to a walled garden of a couple hundred specially-encoded YouTube videos. Most of our customers want to be able to play every YouTube video they want, and you can with Kinoma Player. You just choose Open URL, enter the page URL, and you’re watching your favorite videos. “The program has rejected almost every format I can save videos in.” It’s a mobile device, so as long as you keep that constraint in mind, Kinoma Player supports nearly all popular formats (see “Content Compatibility” in http://kinoma.com/index/player-4-documentation for the full list). If you need help, please stop by our forum (forum.kinoma.com), and we’ll help you get great results with your encoding application of choice. – Charles

    Comment by Charles@Kinoma — July 1, 2007 @ 9:23 pm

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