Kinoma Player 3 EX Day 1

Kinoma Player 3 EX sports these new features:

• View MPEG-4 video, listen to AAC audio and view JPEG photos.
• Zoom, Rotate and Pan movies and photos.
• Plays many 3GP (mobile phone), iTunes, and QuickTime files
• Sort songs by album, artist or title
• State-of-the-art MPEG-4 video and AAC audio compression let you pack more on a memory card.
• Stream movies using mobile phone, 802.11 and Bluetooth networks

Out of all those features, I was most interested in the AAC playback. This way I could carry some of those itunes converted songs. MP4 playback is cool, but I've been a long user of mmplayer and still quite happy with it.

Kinoma offers a trail version of the Player, but the down side of this trial version is that it doesn't let you try out any of the new features of mp4 playback! go figure. Well actually they say it's due to some licensing issues, but whatever.
I was a bit irked by that. I thought the purpose of a trail was to uh... try it... hmmm.
The trial version (3.1.1) does let you playback AAC, so I loaded up a couple of AAC encoded songs. Upon launching the Player, Kinoma does a scan of the cards to locate any material it can handle, which can include any jpgs you've got. According to a few users off the Kinoma Support Forum, depending on how much content you've got stored away, this scanning can go for awhile. I guess if you've got a 1GB card, I can see where this can be very annoying. The playback of AAC went over pretty flawlessly. I'm using a Palm Tungsten, so nothing really fancy going on in the hardware department. Impressions of the player itself is that it's very minimal. I would say it is a barebones player. Comparing it to something like Pocket Tunes, it lacks multiple playlist creations and shuffle play. In fact, the concept of a playlist is merely going back to the main list of audio content. There's no ability to move content up or down the list. I could understand lack of support for some of the features, if this was a beta release. But as a full priced product? Well if you're absolutely dying for AAC support on your Palm, go for it. Oh and another odd fact: No mp3 support.

Next I'll be going over the video playback portion of Kinoma Player EX 3... stay tuned...