The coolest applications on the Windows Mobile platform

I didn't have to think very long and hard about which applications are the coolest ones available on the Windows Mobile platform today. There's no question in my mind that The Core Portable Media Player, known as TCPMP for short, is the coolest must-have Windows Mobile application available today. This free media player gem is capable of playing back media formats that even commercial WM players cannot, most notable Flash video (.flv) files which are so heavily promoted these days, especially on video aggregation sites like YouTube. I use TCPMP as my primary Windows Mobile media player, and use it every day. One really great time saving feature I've employed with TCPMP is its ability to playback audio at faster rates. This comes in handy when trying to catch up on a backlog of podcasts. Unfortunately, the pitch is affected with this speed increase but I've acclimated to the chipmunk audio and have even trained my ears to discern spoken words sped up to 200% the original playback speed.

The second half of this cool application scenario is an RSS reader called NewsBreak that also supports efficient download of RSS enclosures, predominantly for podcast audio and video files. While NewsBreak does a fine job of retrieving RSS feeds and their attachments, I do wish I could instruct NewsBreak to automatically move downloaded files from its own file store to preferred folders depending on the podcast name. Instead, I currently must manually 'Save As...' for each downloaded file, then remember to delete the original copy lest I run out of storage space. I then have to manually reconstruct a new playlist to incorporate the newly moved files. It's a pain, but worth the strain compared to the old way of manually copying files from a RSS reader on my PC and reconstructing playlists.

Combined, these two programs have literally kept me entertained and informed for weeks thereby not only qualifying as two of the coolest and useful Windows Mobile applications but also two of the most used as well.