CorePlayer for Symbian Review
CorePlayer for Symbian came with much hoopla, with recent WinMo converts to Symbian swearing on it. As usual, I remained skeptical, as I am with anything that gets that much hype.
I have several things that I want to point out first and foremost. These things I find to be real barriers to CorePlayer making a big dent in the Symbian Media Player arena:
1. No trial period - They’ve covered this (you can read the reasoning here) but I still think, especially for an app that’s $30, that not having a trial period is a bad choice. Yes, they offer refunds if you’re not satisfied, but that’s still a big pain in the butt, imo. Supposedly v1.2+ will have a trial period.
2. Reg code entry - first off, the registration code for CorePlayer looks like a Windows activation code, as you can see by mine: RH5RB5-XB3NU9-55915S-Z90LRL-6DSLBB (it’s tied to the IMEI, but I also changed a few characters, so it’s useless). This is a pretty big pain in the butt to enter on a phone. Also, it starts you out with T9 active, so you have to turn it off before entering the code. Minute, but still annoying. Also, the cursor doesn’t automatically move to the next field when you’ve typed in a set. You have to manually progress it. Again, minute, but annoying.
The remainder of this review is more or less little snippets. To be honest, I find the app useless, specially when compared to the built-in Media Player. However, I also don’t watch movies on my phone anymore (just don’t have time, and the idea of converting all of my movies is a HUGE turn-off for me). To be fair, I also find Smartmovie rather pointless for my usage.
So then what did they do right?
It’s really easy to navigate CorePlayer. The right softkey is always labeled "view", and allows you to scroll through several views, including the Now Playing and Media Library views. That’s handy, and I like that it’s consistent. The left softkey is either Options or Database (depending on what screen you’re at), both of which are appropriate to what’s going on with the app at the time.
I also like that you can tell CorePlayer what folders to look in, what to ignore. If you’ve got several MP3 ringtones in your device, this is REALLY handy so that you don’t have to filter those out when creating playlists and whatnot. Speaking of playlists, if you have one in the scanned folders, it will find it and add the playlist to your library. Very handy. There are also several auto-playlists already created for you. I like that they took the time to do that, but wonder how accurate they’ll be for someone who changes the library on their device often.
The options are where CorePlayer really shines. There’s a very detailed Equalizer that you can enable and adjust to your heart’s content. You can also create your own personal presets to load up quicker. The downside is that it’s hidden in the subsystem. To get to it, you must go to Menu, Tools (which you have scroll to find), Equalizer.
You can also, for video files, adjust the Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Red, Green, and Blue settings. You get to watch the video while doing so, and changes are made real-time. Again, you can create your own custom profiles for this so that they’re easy to quickly activate.
My album art did NOT transfer to the CorePlayer. I have non-DRMd mp3s that HAVE album art in iTunes. This isn’t a big deal to me, but I know it’s huge for some of you. Also, there’s no option for a visualization in CorePlayer, which I found disappointing.
Also note, on devices such as the N95 (and upcoming N81) that have dedicated music keys, since CorePlayer is not a system app, they will not work. Neither will the volume rocker on the side of the device. I did discover that you can use the 4 and 6 keys to skip the track. The D-pad left and right will FF/Rewind the current track, and up/down changes the volume.
There’s so many options, so rather than taking a few screenshots, I went ahead and recorded a video of just going through the numerous screens. If you see something that I didn’t cover, feel free to leave it in the comments.
Personally? I’d hold out till v1.2 before plunking down the cash on this one. It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth the money, I mean, it’s the same price as Smartmovie, I just think they have some things to fix before I’d pay $30 for it.
What’s your experience? Thoughts?
If i want to buy a application,and if the application not having a trial period, so to try, I will search for the cracked version.. yeah cracked! but only to try it. Ok, So, I use the crack version of this coreplayer.. overall, I don’t really need this application.. its not worth to buy it. huuh.
I wonder why Nokia didn’t power up the build in player with some more standard codecs like DivX, XviD, H.264 (AVC), OGG?
A little more afford that would have made me more than happy :-/
& also, dont forge about wmv !! hehe
CorePlayer saved me from not being able to share a movie tonight. The girlfriend wanted to watch Superman Returns, but didn’t want to sit in front of the PC monitor to do it. The Zen was dead, so I couldn’t transfer it to that and just watch it on the TV out. On a whim, I thought I’d throw it on my microSD card, unconverted, and see how it handled itself.
Sure enough, it played just fine! Some of the textures were blocky and it had a hard time with some of the action scenes, but it was still very watchable through TV-out. The best part was the sound was incredible on the surround system in all its uncompressed glory. Not bad at all.
For long term use, it makes much more sense to convert to something smaller for space reasons (the avi file for the movie was a little over 900mb), but I’m pretty impressed with it.
Look just BUY smartmovie and get DIVX mobile FREE from there site. It’ll save you alot of head ache. both of those will cover all your video needs