Sony Ericsson Media Go review: First look - 3

And finally, getting video to your mobile

Probably one of the most hip and touted features of the Sony Ericsson Media Go application is that it can take any video you throw at it and transfer it to your mobile phone in a playable format by transcoding it on the go.

Most of our commenting users are quite enthusiastic about the fact that Media Go is a free video converter that will convert their desktop videos hassle-free and then transfer them to the cellphone all in one go.

Well, we didn't share that enthusiasm because we've seen other software take on the task of oversimplifying the matter of video conversion for mobile devices and the results are rarely nice to watch.

All that being said, converting and transferring videos with Media Go didn't manage to impress us too, and there are several reasons for that and we would gladly elaborate on them.

But first, let's take a look at the pros of having an application such as Media Go do your video conversions:

• It's an extra easy process
  
• It requires little or no setup and technical knowledge
  
• You only need one application to both convert and transfer video to your handset
  
• The results can be quite satisfactory if you are not too demanding
  

Media Go offers two levels of video quality (Space saving and High quality) and two types of audio encoding (AAC or MP3), both of which have their own three levels of quality (Space saving, high quality, and very high quality).

The Space saving setting for video indeed did what it's suppose do - it shrank our test video 40% down compared to the High quality converted video, however the quality did suffer quite obviously. According to us the compromise was just not worth it. The High quality video however looked flawless on the W995 screen and it still was not that big.

As for audio - we preferred the High quality setting for an optimal output. We were quite impressed by the Sony Ericsson W995 stereo speakers and how rich their sound is.

What we didn't like however is Sony Ericsson's idea of video-capable handset - the W995. It certainly lacks some key features that are important to a portable video player.

(1) You have to encode most videos to run on the phone. You cannot just throw one of the most popular video formats such as DivX or XviD and expect that it plays them. As you can guess the disadvantages of the Media Go video conversion fall under the first point.

a) First off, it's the logic of conversion that bugs us.

You certainly know the black bars displayed on the top and bottom of a video when you watch widescreen material on a non-widescreen display. Well, usually those black bars are not part of the video themselves; they just indicate the parts of the screen that have not been filled with video content. With the Media Go converted videos however, the black bars ARE part of the video.

b) Furthermore, the videos are encoded directly to QVGA resolution.

That means zooming in the video player (at the expense of side cropping) will in fact deteriorate the video quality. That leads us to the second main disadvantage of W995 as a portable video player.

c) And finally, conversion takes time.

Converting a 570MB XviD AVI video clip with 640 x 240 pixels resolution took us 30 minutes on a regular spec'd XP rig with 2MB RAM based on C2D E5200. If we were just copying the file to the handset, it would have taken us only 4 minutes.

(2) Then the second bugger is that the Sony Ericsson W995 screen doesn't have the widescreen ratio that most videos have. So in result the actual widescreen video feed can take up as little as 1/2 of the display size - quite insufficient.

Final words

Media Go seems like a capable application and its performance was flawless during our test. Managing music with it is fine, but videos and photos get scaled to agree with your handset. If you use regular aspect videos (4:3, the aspect of VGA-res clips), you would be quite happy with the output quality. Widescreen videos however turn quite small on that screen and zooming in only makes things worse.

On a different note, we couldn't help but wonder why Sony Ericsson decided to ditch their Media Manager, which was only around for a year or two. They could have just upgraded it to accommodate the new stuff such as the Play Now Arena integration and the Podcasts subscription service, but instead they've decided to go for a totally new app.

As a result in a few months time there will be not one but three applications that users will use for syncing various content to their Sony Ericsson phones - Media Go, Media Manager and PC Suite.

We would have really preferred it that Sony Ericsson went for the integration path - merging Media Manager and PC Suite instead so users can sync both their multimedia and PIM with one single application.

Leaving that nuisance aside, our final verdict, is that the combination of Sony Ericsson W995 and Media Go doesn't sound like the best portable video combo we've seen. If video on-the-go is important to you, our recommendation is to stick with powerful smartphones that both support a wide range of video formats and are capable enough to playback desktop videos without any conversion whatsoever.

Sony Ericsson Media Go review: First look - 3

And finally, getting video to your mobile

Probably one of the most hip and touted features of the Sony Ericsson Media Go application is that it can take any video you throw at it and transfer it to your mobile phone in a playable format by transcoding it on the go.

Most of our commenting users are quite enthusiastic about the fact that Media Go is a free video converter that will convert their desktop videos hassle-free and then transfer them to the cellphone all in one go.

Well, we didn't share that enthusiasm because we've seen other software take on the task of oversimplifying the matter of video conversion for mobile devices and the results are rarely nice to watch.

All that being said, converting and transferring videos with Media Go didn't manage to impress us too, and there are several reasons for that and we would gladly elaborate on them.

But first, let's take a look at the pros of having an application such as Media Go do your video conversions:

• It's an extra easy process
  
• It requires little or no setup and technical knowledge
  
• You only need one application to both convert and transfer video to your handset
  
• The results can be quite satisfactory if you are not too demanding
  

Media Go offers two levels of video quality (Space saving and High quality) and two types of audio encoding (AAC or MP3), both of which have their own three levels of quality (Space saving, high quality, and very high quality).

The Space saving setting for video indeed did what it's suppose do - it shrank our test video 40% down compared to the High quality converted video, however the quality did suffer quite obviously. According to us the compromise was just not worth it. The High quality video however looked flawless on the W995 screen and it still was not that big.

As for audio - we preferred the High quality setting for an optimal output. We were quite impressed by the Sony Ericsson W995 stereo speakers and how rich their sound is.

What we didn't like however is Sony Ericsson's idea of video-capable handset - the W995. It certainly lacks some key features that are important to a portable video player.

(1) You have to encode most videos to run on the phone. You cannot just throw one of the most popular video formats such as DivX or XviD and expect that it plays them. As you can guess the disadvantages of the Media Go video conversion fall under the first point.

a) First off, it's the logic of conversion that bugs us.

You certainly know the black bars displayed on the top and bottom of a video when you watch widescreen material on a non-widescreen display. Well, usually those black bars are not part of the video themselves; they just indicate the parts of the screen that have not been filled with video content. With the Media Go converted videos however, the black bars ARE part of the video.

b) Furthermore, the videos are encoded directly to QVGA resolution.

That means zooming in the video player (at the expense of side cropping) will in fact deteriorate the video quality. That leads us to the second main disadvantage of W995 as a portable video player.

c) And finally, conversion takes time.

Converting a 570MB XviD AVI video clip with 640 x 240 pixels resolution took us 30 minutes on a regular spec'd XP rig with 2MB RAM based on C2D E5200. If we were just copying the file to the handset, it would have taken us only 4 minutes.

(2) Then the second bugger is that the Sony Ericsson W995 screen doesn't have the widescreen ratio that most videos have. So in result the actual widescreen video feed can take up as little as 1/2 of the display size - quite insufficient.

Final words

Media Go seems like a capable application and its performance was flawless during our test. Managing music with it is fine, but videos and photos get scaled to agree with your handset. If you use regular aspect videos (4:3, the aspect of VGA-res clips), you would be quite happy with the output quality. Widescreen videos however turn quite small on that screen and zooming in only makes things worse.

On a different note, we couldn't help but wonder why Sony Ericsson decided to ditch their Media Manager, which was only around for a year or two. They could have just upgraded it to accommodate the new stuff such as the Play Now Arena integration and the Podcasts subscription service, but instead they've decided to go for a totally new app.

As a result in a few months time there will be not one but three applications that users will use for syncing various content to their Sony Ericsson phones - Media Go, Media Manager and PC Suite.

We would have really preferred it that Sony Ericsson went for the integration path - merging Media Manager and PC Suite instead so users can sync both their multimedia and PIM with one single application.

Leaving that nuisance aside, our final verdict, is that the combination of Sony Ericsson W995 and Media Go doesn't sound like the best portable video combo we've seen. If video on-the-go is important to you, our recommendation is to stick with powerful smartphones that both support a wide range of video formats and are capable enough to playback desktop videos without any conversion whatsoever.

Sony Ericsson Media Go review: First look - 2

Starting Media Go for the first time

When Media Go first loaded up, it quite nicely asked whether we'd like to import the current iTunes library directly to the Sony Ericsson software. That means that if you use iTunes to organize your multimedia collection, getting everything to Media Go will be extra easy.

For the rest of you, Media Go will just scan your entire hard drive for available multimedia files and will sort them by their type in its Library module. The initial scanning can take a while so be prepared.

Media Go scanning the computer for multimedia

Interestingly, Media Go is not just an organizer application - it's a full-featured music player as well - quite similar to iTunes or Windows Media Player for example. Here is how the mini mode of Media Go looks like - quite unobtrusive mini player actually.

Media Go mini mode

When we connected our Sony Ericsson W995, both its internal memory and its external memory appeared as library modules on the left side of the software interface. Multimedia files on the device are again sorted according to their type, plus playlists get listed as well so you can drag-and-drop them where you want.

Connecting the W995: phone memory and memory card appear as separate drives

Managing music

Now that we got access to both our computer music library and the W995 library through the software interface, managing music was an easy task. So was creating playlists.

Media Go allows you to create custom playlists in the computer music library as a standard feature. Once the phone has been connected though, you can easily transfer those to its memory.

Transferring music tracks with Media Go was reasonably fast - the modest 80MB of music (15 MP3 tracks) took 40 seconds to copy to the Sony Ericsson W995 memory card - that's about 2MB/s of write speed.

Album Art view: managing music with Media Go is easy - so is creating playlists

Media Go also allows for creating SensMe playlists with your computer's music, so it essentially brings the Walkman goodies to the desktop.

In case you've missed it, SensMe is one of the differentiating music features of Sony Ericsson Walkman products. The principle behind SensMe is the following: a desktop application (previously Sony Ericsson Media Manager) automatically assigns a mood to every track based on tempo and style. Afterwards you transfer that music to the phone and you can use that embedded information to easily create quick playlists to match your mood.

On the phone SensMe has an innovative visual interface representing tracks as dots in a matrix and positioning them according to the mood they've been designated. Now with Media Go, Sony Ericsson are bringing that interface to the computer desktop - easily transferable to the handset as well.

Creating SensMe playlists is really fast as it should be - nice job

Getting stuff from PlayNow Arena

Another feature of Sony Ericsson Media Go is the integration of the Play Now Arena multimedia store (think iTunes store - if you have any experience with the Apple product).

Sony Ericsson Play Now Arena was launched this year and it allows users to buy music, games, ringtones, wallpapers and themes for Sony Ericsson mobiles. There is free content as well - but right now it only seems to be limited to ringtones and wallpapers.

Additionally Play Now Arena hopes to attract visitors by getting you access to what other users are checking out via TrackID - that way you can easily see which tracks are currently most popular.

The Media Go interface to PlayNow Arena is identical to the user experience form visiting their Flash-based website, so you can easily get the idea.

For now Play Now Arena is only available to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Support for other countries will come in the future.

MediaGo gets you easy access to Sony Ericsson Play Now Arena

There are podcasts as well

Again, much like iTunes, Sony Ericsson Media Go gets you access to a large number of online podcasts that you can subscribe to. You can add custom ones as well.

Media Go will automatically download new episodes of the subscribed podcasts and if you choose, it can even automatically sync them to your phone.

Browsing available podcast via Media Go

Sony Ericsson Media Go review: First look - 2

Starting Media Go for the first time

When Media Go first loaded up, it quite nicely asked whether we'd like to import the current iTunes library directly to the Sony Ericsson software. That means that if you use iTunes to organize your multimedia collection, getting everything to Media Go will be extra easy.

For the rest of you, Media Go will just scan your entire hard drive for available multimedia files and will sort them by their type in its Library module. The initial scanning can take a while so be prepared.

Media Go scanning the computer for multimedia

Interestingly, Media Go is not just an organizer application - it's a full-featured music player as well - quite similar to iTunes or Windows Media Player for example. Here is how the mini mode of Media Go looks like - quite unobtrusive mini player actually.

Media Go mini mode

When we connected our Sony Ericsson W995, both its internal memory and its external memory appeared as library modules on the left side of the software interface. Multimedia files on the device are again sorted according to their type, plus playlists get listed as well so you can drag-and-drop them where you want.

Connecting the W995: phone memory and memory card appear as separate drives

Managing music

Now that we got access to both our computer music library and the W995 library through the software interface, managing music was an easy task. So was creating playlists.

Media Go allows you to create custom playlists in the computer music library as a standard feature. Once the phone has been connected though, you can easily transfer those to its memory.

Transferring music tracks with Media Go was reasonably fast - the modest 80MB of music (15 MP3 tracks) took 40 seconds to copy to the Sony Ericsson W995 memory card - that's about 2MB/s of write speed.

Album Art view: managing music with Media Go is easy - so is creating playlists

Media Go also allows for creating SensMe playlists with your computer's music, so it essentially brings the Walkman goodies to the desktop.

In case you've missed it, SensMe is one of the differentiating music features of Sony Ericsson Walkman products. The principle behind SensMe is the following: a desktop application (previously Sony Ericsson Media Manager) automatically assigns a mood to every track based on tempo and style. Afterwards you transfer that music to the phone and you can use that embedded information to easily create quick playlists to match your mood.

On the phone SensMe has an innovative visual interface representing tracks as dots in a matrix and positioning them according to the mood they've been designated. Now with Media Go, Sony Ericsson are bringing that interface to the computer desktop - easily transferable to the handset as well.

Creating SensMe playlists is really fast as it should be - nice job

Getting stuff from PlayNow Arena

Another feature of Sony Ericsson Media Go is the integration of the Play Now Arena multimedia store (think iTunes store - if you have any experience with the Apple product).

Sony Ericsson Play Now Arena was launched this year and it allows users to buy music, games, ringtones, wallpapers and themes for Sony Ericsson mobiles. There is free content as well - but right now it only seems to be limited to ringtones and wallpapers.

Additionally Play Now Arena hopes to attract visitors by getting you access to what other users are checking out via TrackID - that way you can easily see which tracks are currently most popular.

The Media Go interface to PlayNow Arena is identical to the user experience form visiting their Flash-based website, so you can easily get the idea.

For now Play Now Arena is only available to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Support for other countries will come in the future.

MediaGo gets you easy access to Sony Ericsson Play Now Arena

There are podcasts as well

Again, much like iTunes, Sony Ericsson Media Go gets you access to a large number of online podcasts that you can subscribe to. You can add custom ones as well.

Media Go will automatically download new episodes of the subscribed podcasts and if you choose, it can even automatically sync them to your phone.

Browsing available podcast via Media Go

Sony Ericsson Media Go review: First look 1

Introduction

Now, what's with the software review on the GSM Arena homepage, you might ask. Well, last week you could have said that for Blackberry as well. We guess it's time for another first. Today however we're getting a closer look at Sony Ericsson's Media Go desktop multimedia management software.

Back in February Sony Ericsson promised to revolutionize the way users transfer and consume video on the company's feature phones. The newly announced Media Go multimedia manager not only keeps your music in order, but it also crunches every multimedia file you throw at it to a format that's easily digestible by a regular mobile phone.

Media Go did cause a lot of commotion in the comments section of our recently published Sony Ericsson W995 review. It's the first phone to come bundled with Media Go and some users felt that we didn't stress enough on the potentially overwhelming capabilities of this new software.

Well, truth be told, we didn't really think such software is the kind of feat to write home about, so we just didn't share that enthusiasm. But guess what what we did as soon as we acquired a working beta copy of Media Go. That's right, we went writing about it.

Getting started with Media Go

Our first surprise with the new piece of software is that it's actually branded by Sony, and not Sony Ericsson. Perhaps, this will only be true for the beta version of the software, we are not really sure yet.

On first launch Media Go surely felt like a Sony commercial product. Much like the other Sony commercial products we've seen, you have to enter the supplied serial number and register with the Sony, in order to use the application.

Once that we were beyond the registration process, the software loaded up and was ready to roll. We connected our Sony Ericsson W995 and we were presented by the last surprise for the day.

Media Go cannot connect to the phone straight out-of-the-box. As it turns out, Media Go won't be substituting the regular Sony Ericsson PC Suite despite our expectations. Instead, both applications should be installed on your desktop computer, as PC Suite is the application that actually takes care of the needed USB drivers, etc.

After we sorted that out as well, it was time to finally take a deeper look at the new Media Go application and the way it's put to use by Sony Ericsson phones.

Join us on the next page, as we explore it.

LG KM900 Arena preview: First look - 7

Middling camera, first-rate video recording

We really had high hopes for the 5 megapixel camera on the Arena but the best we can say about it at this point is OK. The full-res samples reveal poor detail. But let's not forget it's a pre-release unit, which may as well have most of the issues fixed before it's retail-ready.

The good things about the camera are that there is no over sharpening and the colors are lively and perfectly matching the scenes we shot. If it wasn't for the problematic detail we would've called the camera perfect. It's hard to find a cameraphone with such accurate colors and crisp contrast.

The LED flash is useless. It really struggles in poor light and will hardly make a difference, even in close quarters.

Camera samples downsampled to 1024 x 768 pixels

The viewfinder is not the typical LG. Access to all the camera settings is via the left taskbar in the viewfinder. There you get virtual buttons for settings, flash, focus mode (auto/macro) and exposure.

This left task bar auto hides and is brought back as an overlay when you tap on the screen. On the right hand-side of the screen is another bar with a virtual shutter key, exit and gallery buttons. It's fixed and is actually not part of the viewfinder - that's the way to get around the wide aspect ratio of the LG Arena screen. That way the Arena doesn't crop part of the scene like the LG Renoir.

The actual Settings menu is a clever rotating dial with the available options for each setting displayed as a list. The interface is very handy, neat and usable, geotagging and image stabilization are among the nice extras.

The camera interface

The LG KM900 Arena is capable of capturing video of up to D1 (720x480) resolution at 30 fps and slow-motion QVGA clips at 120 fps. The Arena, much like the LG Secret, takes the extra step of adding Fast videos. This is the time-lapse video capture seen in many digicams.

The actual quality is more than adequate and there is no trouble with frame rate either. Slow and Fast motion recording is available and with the right things to shoot can be real fun. Unfortunately, those are still limited to QVGA resolution. Even YouTube.com publish higher-res videos online these days.

Camcorder options

The flash can also be turned on to act as a video light. Quite naturally, you can also record sound with videos, except in fast/slow-mo of course. As we already pointed out, the dedicated video recording microphone is on the back of the phone. Videos are encoded in MP4 but are saved in 3GP format.

Here's a sample to check out.

Web browser is nice, but still slow

The browser is decent, almost identical to the one on the Renoir and Prada 2. Scrolling and panning is quite prompt and smooth. Thanks to the multi-touch implementation on the capacitive screen, the Arena delivers where other browsers fail - the legendary 'pinch' zoom the iPhone is popular with.

Loading pages though is a bit slow. Compared to the iPhone, the LG Arena browser takes double the time to open the same web page - both over Wi-Fi.

Entering a web address

The multi-touch zooming has been tweaked since the latest Prada and now it takes less time than before. There still is an annoying lag but at least the actual zooming is more accurate and does not interpret the gestures wrong. It's not as fluid as the iPhone but does the job right.

Browsing GSM Arena on the LG Arena

The controls don't auto-hide and the only option to make them disappear is to turn on the full screen view from the browser menu or rotate the phone to landscape. There the accelerometer comes into play and does its job pretty well.

A useful feature is that you can have two pages open at the same time in tabs and switch back and forth between them. Saving pages for offline viewing is another thing that you'd probably use quite often.

Full-screen view * the browser visual history

Another handy browser skill is searching web pages for specific words - the first match gets highlighted and the total number of matches is displayed, with up and down buttons for switching between them.

A visual enhancement of the plain browsing history list is the option to view snapshots of the pages you've visited. You can flick between the pages and tap to open the one you are looking for.

The LG Arena web browser lacks full Flash support.

GPS enabled

Google Maps is the most popular electronic map software for mobile phones and it comes preinstalled on the LG Arena making use of its built-in GPS receiver. Still the Java-powered version of the app wasn't meant for this screen resolution (480x800) and looks awkward on the phone.

Google Maps * the GPS settings screen

Overall, the fact that the LG Arena is not a smartphone will be quite limiting when it comes to picking a GPS voice-guided navigation software as only Java apps can be installed additionally.

Final words

LG have always been prominent on the touchscreen map but the KM900 Arena adds a whole new dimension to their portfolio. The first ever WVGA screen of the house and D1 video recording are enough to make the LG Arena a landmark device. However it’s the S-Class Touch UI that propels the handset to a higher league. It’s elaborate, responsive and impressively attractive – and we’re keen to see more of it, especially on top of the Windows Mobile OS that LG so heartily embraced in Barcelona.

As to the handset itself, the LG Arena hasn’t lost a bit of the impact it made at the WMC. It’s got the novelties right and blends the best of the LG high-end expertise. Maybe it’s too early for vicious head-to-heads but LG seem to have themselves a big enough player in the multimedia game.

LG KM900 Arena preview: First look - 6

Managing contacts is a breeze, so is inputting text

The phone book is quite good has received a redesign and currently seems the best touch-optimized phone book we've seen.

While scrolling the contacts list for instance, a tap on any of the contacts expands a drop-down summary of their contacts details without interfering the browsing in any way. The options for communicating with that particular contact are part of that expanded info and are further scrollable horizontally - quite impressive.

Phonebook • Editing a contact • smart dial is also available

Quite naturally, the LG KM900 Arena offers an onscreen alphanumeric keypad in portrait orientation and a landscape QWERTY thumboard. The QWERTY keys are smallish but each symbol you tap is clearly marked by iPhone-style pop-ups.

The alphanumeric and QWERTY keyboards

Gallery is a real 3D treat

LG Arena offers two gallery modes depending on the handset's orientation. In portrait mode images and videos are displayed in a grid while in landscape mode one image is displayed in the center and two more by its side in an impressive 3D spatial view.

Did somebody say Cover Flow? Yes, the layout is quite similar to the Apple iPhone Cover Flow Album Art browsing, but let us remind you that the iPhone offers that view mode in its iPod music player only.

The gallery

As the LG KM900 Arena supports multi-touch you can zoom in images with the pinching gesture well known from Apple's iPhone - we really hope that Apple don't have a patent pending on this one or LG are toasted.

Dolby enhanced music playback is just fine

The LG KM900 Arena Music player is accessible both from the Cube interface as well as from the main menu. The homescreen music player is rather basic but it does the job of quick access to the playing music.

The tracks are displayed on a rotating reel and get visualized with their album artwork "printed" on virtual vinyl records.

One of the two music players aboard

The full-featured music player sits in the main menu. You can sort tracks by artist, album, genre and your rating. The current track's artwork, name, album and artist are displayed in the screen's center while the next and previous track are visible at the top and bottom of the screen.

The main music player is just great

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer, when you tilt the phone, the music player automatically switches its orientation from/to landscape mode.

The main music player in portrait and landscape mode

A very useful feature is the Search option. However, if you have applied some sorting such as album view, for instance, you can only search the album names and not the actual tracks.

There are tons of equalizer presets (all non-customizable, though) and among all of them two managed to impress us. The first is the highly advertised Dolby for Mobile sound enhancement.

With Dolby Mobile the sound gets more spacious and richer. Bobcat Mobile was also a really nice preset which is best suited for techno tracks. However with all the presets available we're sure you'd find yourself a favorite one as well.

There are tons of equalizer presets, all non-customizable, though

Surely a nice touch to the LG Arena feature list is the in-built FM transmitter allowing you to stream wirelessly the currently played tracks to any standard FM radio receiver (e.g. car audio or home multimedia system).

A nice touch is the built-in FM transmitter

Video player

The LG Arena comes with a relatively large touch screen (especially for a device of that size) measuring good 3". That, along with the DivX/XviD support turns it into a potentially excellent portable video player - especially considering the good track record. The LG Renoir for example managed to play every desktop XViD/DivX video we threw at it. Unfortunately, we had issues with DivX/XviD support in our pre-production unit, but LG will surely fix that in the retail version.

To switch the video player to full screen mode you only need to tilt the phone to landscape position. A tap on the touch screen reveals the onscreen overlay controls. Except for the standard controls (such as play/pause, volume, etc.) you can also change playing speed and to zoom in or out.

The video player

Unlike the LG Renoir, with the LG Arena the Dolby for Mobile sound enhancement can be turned on during video playback. Of course, that enhancement is put to best use with headphones.