In a nutshell...
Play almost any variety of video format on your Nok.
What’s it good for?
Er, playing videos on your phone - and not much else, to be honest.
Judgement time...
Nokia handsets can be a wee bit picky when it comes to playing back digital video files, so a piece of software that takes any movie, converts it automatically to a friendly format then plays it back sounds like a winner.
Mobiola’s Media Player claims to be one such piece of software. Incidentally, it’ll play MP3 music files too, although as your phone’s built-in music player will do the job just as well (if not better), we’ll concentrate only on the video performance in this review.
The makers say Media Player is compatible with AVI (encoded with DivX, XviD and MPEG-4) and 3GP video files, so we copied a few XviD movies and TV shows over to our phone to test it out. None of them would play.
It turns out that you have to convert the files to a friendly version of the format first, using a piece of computer software (Windows only) packaged with Media Player. While this is pretty fast and really easy to use, requiring only that you drag and drop your chosen files, it kind of misses the point as far as we’re concerned. After all, you could just download the free Symbian DivX player and install it on your Nok (read our tutorial here), then stick your movies straight on the phone, no conversion needed. Why pay cash money for something that adds an extra step to the process?
The converter does work with almost every kind of video format under the sun, so if you’ve got a ton of MOV or WMV files that you want to ogle on your phone, it could be worth a look. That said, you can download a free DivX converter and do the same, saving yourself a few quid in the process.
Once your file is converted the software copies automatically onto your phone. Firing up our first ever movie, however, we found the audio to be slightly choppy. The picture was fine, but the frequent cracks and pops in the soundtrack quickly became irritating.
Basically, we were entirely unimpressed with Mobiola Media Player. It does make getting movies onto your Nok a very easy process, but they’re simply not that great once they’re on there - and if you’re willing to do a little more legwork you can get better results without spending a single penny. Our advice: do that, and avoid shelling out for this.