Kinoma Notes

Less than 200 hours after its introduction, Kinoma Play won its first award.

It’s a great one, too — WMExperts did a roundup of the best Windows Mobile media players, and they crowned Kinoma Play “Best Windows Mobile Media Player”.

WMExperts also declared a best “classic” media player, but they didn’t have a chance to put it up against our other Windows Mobile product, the free Kinoma FreePlay.

Kinoma FreePlay includes not only a full-featured music player, but also support for tens of thousands of streaming internet radio stations, podcast and audiobook streaming, the world’s best YouTube and Flickr support, the ability to stream all of your music from home via Orb (also free), and more.

• Media Player Roundup: The Winner(s) Declared [WMExperts]

If you picked up The Wall Street Journal today, you saw that we had the great pleasure of being reviewed by Katherine Boehret for The Mossberg Solution.

After almost a week with this application, I changed the way I thought about on-the-go Web browsing for media. I forgot about typical browser functions like typing a Web site’s name into a URL bar and instead did plenty of things online with my portable device without deliberately thinking about being online.

Kinoma Play is so well-designed that I wish it could entirely replace the dated Windows Mobile user interface…

Wow….what a great compliment. Her wrap-up is very kind as well:

These days in the tech world, much attention is being paid to applications sold on Apple’s App Store for use with the iPhone or iPod Touch. But Kinoma Play is one application that is desperately needed by Windows Mobile users, and it just might remind them that they can better navigate media-related Web services — without having to buy a new mobile device.

The whole review is excellent. Be sure to check it out to read more what she loved, and where she thought we could do even better.

• Better Navigation for Your Mobile [The Wall Street Journal]

In 2005, Kinoma started an audacious project. We started work on a new type of mobile software — a “mobile media browser” — that would target advanced hardware and modern mobile operating systems not even available at the time.

The goal? To answer the question, “In a perfect world, how should mobile media work?” Today, we proudly present our answer.

Introducing Kinoma Play, available now for Windows Mobile. To get a taste of what Kinoma Play can do, watch these:

• Kinoma Play: Podcasts
• Kinoma Play: Music
• Kinoma Play: Pictures
• Kinoma Play: Search

And if that’s not enough, we present Felipe’s Dream for dessert.

Kinoma Play is everything you need to find and play video, audio and pictures, whether it’s on your phone, on your home PC, or on web services like YouTube, Flickr, Live365 and Audible.

We hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

By now, the exciting news has rippled through the Palm and Windows Mobile communities — Kinoma is preparing to release it’s first-ever Windows Mobile product.

Coincidentally, this week Palm released the Treo 800w, a great new Windows Mobile phone. It’s got a beautiful 320x320 screen, EVDO Rev. A and Wi-Fi, giving it the potential to be a great mobile multimedia device.

If you have a Treo 800w or are thinking about buying one, you’re definitely going to want to hear about our forthcoming product. Here’s how to be notified:

Go to kinoma.com, choose Palm and Treo 800w in the “Is my phone compatible?” widget, and then click the arrow. Enter your name and email address, and we’ll send you a note the day the new product is available.

We just finished a substantial update to Kinoma Media Guide, designed to make it an even better resource for finding and playing the best mobile-ready media.

In some cases we’ve reorganized some categories to make more sense going forward. This post is the key to easily finding your favorites.

First, the 10,000-foot view:

And now, a couple tips for getting around:

• Tip #1: You’re probably going to be using the Browse by Provider category more than ever. It’s often going to be the easiest way to get to major media and web properties, from ABC to YouTube.
• Tip #2: Webcams, one of our customers’ favorite categories, is now in Travel & Weather.

As usual, this update is free and automatic for all Kinoma Player customers.

Remember that we make this guide for you. If you have favorite content that you can’t find in the guide, let us know by emailing us your feedback and suggestions at content@ plus our domain name.