Nero Mobile: Bringing real multimedia management to Windows Mobile

If you love audio and video content, you’ve probably heard of Nero. The software that was originally known for being the best way to burn CDs has evolved into an application to manage multi-media on your PC. The latest incarnation, Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced (yes, that’s the actual, full name) includes a trial of Nero Mobile, an application for the Windows Mobile platform that brings the power of Nero’s multimedia management to handhelds.

With so many multimedia applications available for the Windows Mobile space, does Nero have what it takes to takes to bring new life to the mobile audio and video landscape?

The Interface

When you first launch Nero Mobile, you’ll be greeted with the very cool looking home screen (shown below). You can also change to a two dimensional display that looks somewhat like the Windows Mobile Programs menu, but has a smooth-scrolling selection window. Unfortunately, the 2D display cuts off half of the text descriptions of each icon (e.g. "Video Libr…") so I would recommend sticking with the 3D menu.

The Nero Mobile home screen is a beautiful set of rotating 3D icons.

Once you select an icon, the application turns into a giant pick list. Unfortunately, I found this not only extremely jarring to be thrown into a list after such a wonderful opening screen, but also nearly unusable. To select an item (for example, to add a song to a play list), you click on it, and it turns a much darker color. In my mind, when an item "blacks out," it is being unselected. This caused me to create a number of empty play lists before I realized exactly what was going on. The pick-list menu system also has a lot of wait time on devices with slower processors. If we’re going to spent this much time waiting for a list to appear, Nero should have maintained the 3D interface with icons to display if the file is music, video or other. (Note: Although Windows Mobile does not display file extensions and instead uses icons to identify each file’s format, Nero Mobile reveals each item’s file extension and does not use icons at all.) Even better, it would have been nice to see album art or a snippet of the video. Scrolling through a 3D list of my music and videos would have been a far more welcome experience than the text list Nero Mobile provides. Finally, I was surprised to find that the application could not automatically scan my device for files that will play in Nero Mobile.

Features

Once you overcome the limitations of the interface, Nero Mobile is quite the performer. With the music library, video library and slide show options, Nero Mobile packs a lot of features in one application.

In the music arena, Nero Mobile supports LC-AAC, HE-AAC, HE-AAC v2, 3GPP, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis formatted music files. The application will show an equalizer bar while playing files without any music information or displays song title, artist information and album art for files that support that information. The player can also be minimized while playing music, so you can list to music while you work elsewhere on your handheld device.

In the video library, movies can be played in standard (see screenshot below) or full screen format. Nero Mobile supports MPEG-4 SP/ASP, H.264/AVC and the company’s proprietary Nero Digital video format. The Nero Digital format provides two things which I think are absolutely beneficial to mobile video: chapter navigation (it’s far more important to jump to a scene on a mobile device where time and battery life may be in short supply) and subtitles (critical when replaying video in noisy environments or on devices where the built-in speaker performs poorly). One additional personal rant: for mobile video to survive (at least during this time where we’re still battling bandwidth and high data surcharge issues), I think it is critical for a company to develop a more convenient and transparent way to send smaller snippets. Saving video to a mobile user should include the option to send a smaller snippet and allow the mobile user to download the entire file from an online location. Granted this is more important where a user is creating video and broadcasting it to mobile users, but the scenario is important to explore as mobile video begins becoming more prevalent.

Nero Mobile can play MPEG-4 SP/ASP, H.264/AVC and Nero Digital video formats.

Finally, in the slideshow menu, you can select photos on your handheld to create a professional presentation which even includes music and "transitions." Nero Mobile includes 6 different transitions to control how the slideshow changes from one photo to the next including fading, sliding in and some very impressive 3D effects.

A Networking Wonderland

In addition to accessing the content on your device, Nero Mobile offers some extremely advanced networking features. Using UPNP (Universal Plug and Play), Nero Mobile can access content directly from your network to play it immediately or add it to any play list on your device. Any computer running the Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced software will appear on the Nero Mobile software, and the software also picked up another UPNP device when I connected to my home network (see screenshot below). Obviously this is a huge benefit for memory-constrained devices. The only feature missing here, is the ability to wirelessly synchronize data. In fact, I was disappointed to see that there is no ability to synch data directly to the device using the Nero desktop software.

Using UPNP (Universal Plug and Play) Nero Mobile can directly access content on your home network.

The company is also working on adding Internet broadcasts to Nero Mobile. This will add the ability to stream video and audio programs to your handheld in several formats including HTTP/RTP streams, DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) and DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting). It is unclear how soon this feature will be available and if users will automatically be offered a free upgrade to add this feature to the software.

Conclusion: A True "Mobile Media Center?"

The company bills Nero Mobile as a "Mobile Media Center" and -for the most part- it truly delivers. You can create multiple slideshows, video play lists, and song lists. A "Collections" icon gives you quick access to all of your song lists and video play lists but, oddly, none of the slideshows. Ideally, I would have liked to have been able to combine them so, for example, a single play list in my Collection screen would begin with a video, and then cut to a slideshow. This shouldn’t be too difficult given that almost all of the functionality is already there.

All said, this is an excellent "first attempt" at creating the most powerful multimedia app available for Windows Mobile. Because of it’s disappointing interface problems, the not-yet-enabled Internet video/audio feature and a lack of true integration between the Nero desktop software and Nero Mobile, I would suggest that everyone but really multimedia-centric users hold off on purchasing this application. Alternately, if you already own Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced and are saving video and music to their file formats, Nero Mobile might be well-worth the steep learning curve for you.

Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced is available for $79.99 and includes a 30-day trial of the Windows Mobile application. Nero Mobile Pro is available separately for $14.99. Nero Mobile requires 7 MB of memory and is available for Windows Mobile 5 or Windows Mobile 2003.

Pros:

• A competent all-in-one video, music and photo player
• Good compression with MPEG-4 support
• Innovative features Nero Digital Format
• Exciting opportunities for networking with UPNP
• Seamless integration of complex video and music codecs
• Beautiful 3D interface on the Nero Mobile client

Cons:

• No on-device help system
• No ability to automatically search the device for multimedia content
• An almost unusable menu system once you click on one of the 3D icons
• No integrated synchronization between Nero desktop application and Nero Mobile
• Since it isn't feature complete, it should be included in the already pricey Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced or the interface needs to be seriously retooled (and better integrated with the desktop site) before it’s released as a stand-alone application