Kinoma Notes

We’ve got a small Flights app update for you today. To get it, just go to Kinoma Play’s Home screen, then choose Get Apps > Flights and update.

Since “sharing” is central to Kinoma apps, Flights lets you share flight info with one touch using SMS or email. This update fixes a bug where shared flight info could be different than what was displayed in Kinoma Play.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

We’d love to hear them. Come talk to us in our community forum.

We first discovered a great mobile-focused blog called The Really Mobile Project when we introduced Kinoma Play for Symbian/S60.

The site published an excellent review of Kinoma Play. Although we linked to it on Twitter a few times, we realized that we’d never made a note of it here!

What’s especially nice is how the author — mobile technology expert Ben Smith — gets to the heart of both the what and the why of Kinoma Play. To quote (emphasis mine):

So what is Kinoma Play? At heart it’s a media player, but that description sells it short. It’s an audio player, picture viewer, a video player, a podcast manager (and player), a YouTube client, plus it’s got interfaces to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

The trouble is, that longer description makes it sound like a mess — trying to be all things to all people… But it’s not. And that’s actually made me a fan. It’s the polish…the refinement, the usability.

I quickly re-produced my media library (normally on my iPhone) onto my now-ageing N82 — podcasts, audio in multiple formats (including non-DRM content from the iTunes Store) and RSS feeds were all viewable just as easily as the iPhone. It’s advanced enough to keep the geeks happy and I’d happily give it to a ‘non-geek’ to use too, it’s that good.

Check out the rest of this thoughtful review at The Really Mobile Project.

(Have a Windows Mobile or Symbian/S60 phone? Don’t own Kinoma Play yet? What are you waiting for? We’re so sure you’ll love it that we offer a risk-free, 30-day money back guarantee.)

• The Really Mobile Project

The game may be over – congrats, Saints! – but today you can re-watch, share and enjoy the great* commercials of Super Bowl XLIV on your phone with Kinoma Play. (*Okay, some are greater than others.)

Go to Kinoma Guide > Featured > Super Bowl Commercials 2010 to enjoy these:

• The Snickers ad with Betty White and the surprise “he’s still alive?” cameo
• Dorito’s viewer-made ads, including the funny “shock collar” ad that won $600,000
• The romantic all-text Google ad
• VW’s “punch dub” ad
• The Audi “green police” ad
• The Bud Light “house of cans” ad

…and lots more! Be sure to click “More” to see all of them, or just start the first and let ‘em roll.

If you hang around technical people, you’ve probably seen those computer books with the funny-looking animals on front.

They’re from O’Reilly Media, best known for great books on everything from super-technical topics like programming, to their “Missing Manual” series for the rest of us.

What you might not know is that O’Reilly creates lots of really interesting video content as well. Today, you can watch hundreds of O’Reilly videos on your phone with Kinoma Play!

Here are the new categories now available in Kinoma Guide > Providers > O’Reilly TV:

• Gov 2.0 Summit 2009 and Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase 2009 — Want to see what happens when you bring together government and technology thought leaders to reshape government for the better? Here are 84 videos from O’Reilly’s 2009 Gov 2.0 conference.
• O’Reilly Conferences — 200 “best of” videos from various O’Reilly conferences and events, including ETech, OSCON, RailsConf, Foo Camp, Sci Foo, Ignite, Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Summit, MySQL Conference & Expo and Expo Where 2.0.
• O’Reilly Interviews — 50+ interviews with notable authors, editors, and innovators, including Tim O’Reilly, Sarah Millstein, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Larry Wall, Pia Waugh, Nat Torkington, and more.
• O’Reilly Webcasts — 140+ webcasts that put you in touch with experts from every area of technology: programmers, web designers, digital photographers, social media gurus, iPhone hackers, open source mavensand more. Each webcast is a recording of a live, online event including Q&As from the audience.
• Tim O’Reilly — 34 talks and interviews with the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and an opponent of software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain.
• Web 2.0 Summit 2009 — 40+ videos featuring the intelligence, innovation, and leadership of the Internet industry, gathered together in one place at one time. Watch incisive plenary sessions, frank onstage conversations, rapid-fire “high order bits”, and Launch Pad, where visionaries and executives from Internet businesses present their unique perspective on the Web’s future-in-flux.
• All O’Reilly TV Videos — Browse through all O’Reilly Media videos, including those that don’t fall into one of the above categories.

Enjoy!

As usual this new Kinoma Guide content is free for all Kinoma Play customers. It’s available right now at Kinoma Guide > Providers > O’Reilly TV.

If you have favorite podcasts, radio stations, video streams or other media, send a URL and short description to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for everyone to discover and enjoy.

Kinoma Play is chock full of little niceties that customers really appreciate. We’d need a 20-foot-tall product page to list them all, so instead we like to talk about them here.

For example, did you know that Kinoma Play automatically remembers where you stopped playing something so you don’t have to?

This is a super-convenient way to nibble on long-form content like podcasts and audiobooks as you have time — nibble while you shop, nibble while you work out, nibble while you drive (with audio-only content, please!).

History continued

This feature works great with History, another handy Kinoma Play feature.

Choose History on the Home screen for a list of everything you’ve listened to lately, and then choose an item to continue right where you left off.

Phone interruptions? No problem

This feature also lets you auto-continue after you make or receive a phone call.

Kinoma Play automatically pauses what you’re playing and then automatically resumes it when the call completes, slowly fading up the volume as it does. Smooooth!