Kinoma Notes

Removable memory is pretty much all alike, isn’t it?

We wish! For better or worse, there can be big differences in quality and speed between one storage card and another.

For quality, all you can really do is buy a brand you trust. But for speed, the good news is that there’s now a standard way of classifying the throughput of SD and SDHC cards — the Speed Class.

It’s really easy to understand, too. Class 2 cards guarantee a minimum transfer speed of 2 MB/second, Class 4 cards a minimum speed of 4 MB/second, etc. A card’s Speed Class should be clearly marked as a number in a round “C”, as shown above.

We recommend that you always buy storage cards that are Class 4 or higher, and we normally buy Class 6 cards ourselves.

With a faster card your phone spends less time on data transfers, which translates to more efficient media playback. As an added bonus, copying media between the card and a PC will be faster as well.

• SD Speed Class [SD Association]

All of us here at Kinoma wish you a happy, safe, and restful holiday.

“The Crunchies” is an award ceremony organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat to honor the companies and products you believe most deserve industry recognition for achievements made in the past year.

The nomination process ends Wednesday, December 10 at midnight PST, so please vote right now. You can vote once per day.

Click on these links to nominate Kinoma Play for any (or all) of the following categories:

• Best Mobile
• Best Design
• Best App
• Best Technology Innovation/Achievement

We just learned about this, so we’d appreciate if you’d vote every day you can, and encourage fellow Kinoma fans to do the same.

Thank you!

• Announcing The Second Annual Crunchies Awards

Do you have one of the HTC — or in the case of the Palm Treo 750, HTC-made — phones listed below?

If so, you only have a little over a week to upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.0 before the official free upgrade downloads go away forever.

• Palm Treo 750 (on AT&T)
• HTC S620/S621 (HTC Excalibur)
• HTC P4350 (HTC Herald)
• HTC P3300 (HTC Artemis)
• HTC Advantage

So be sure to get your upgrade download now, even if you don’t plan on upgrading right away!

• HTC puts Oct. 31 deadline on 6.0 upgrades [WMExperts]

One of the coolest things about Kinoma software is its strong support for standards. Kinoma has always blazed the trail in supporting web and media standards on mobile.

The benefit of using standards is that Kinoma software works with hundreds of other standards-based products and web services. One great web services you can use with Kinoma Player is Yahoo! Pipes.

For example, let’s say you find a really interesting podcast feed that mixes blog entries and podcasts in the same feed. That’s generally considered a no-no, and it’s a problem since Kinoma Player 4 EX is a media player and so doesn’t support text.

The solution? Use Yahoo! Pipes or similar “feed remix” tools to create a feed that just contains stuff that Kinoma Player 4 EX can play. Here’s how:

• Go to pipes.yahoo.com and create a pipe
• Add a Sources > Fetch Feed module, and enter the URL to the source feed
• Add an Operators > Filter module, and “permit” the format extensions you want
• Add an Operators > Sort module and sort descending by date
• Connect everything up as shown below

Neat, huh? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — what can you do with Yahoo! Pipes and Kinoma Player?