Review: Kinoma Play Mobile Media Browser

I’ve had the chance to spend some time fiddling with the new Kinoma Play Mobile Media Browser, and I’m pretty blown away. This product delivers on the promise of being a mobile media powerhouse to the maximum extent that any device with a 2.5″ screen clunking along on a 2.5G network can deliver a “powerful” multimedia experience. Sorry iPhone users – Kinoma only works on Windows Mobile 5+ (Oh come on …. stop whining …. like you don’t have enough to be psyched about. Can’t I have just this one thing to feel special about? Just this one?). It’s not free, but at $30, it’s well worth the investment.

Overview

Basically,  Kinoma Play is an aggregator for all the multimedia content you care about, including content you’ve captured with the device, your content you’ve uploaded to web-based services, content that’s stored on your PC, and the whole universe of other content out there in the form of YouTube videos, podcast directories, and streaming internet radio. The breadth and depth of content accessible from this one application is really impressive.

And it manages to deliver this huge amount of content in an intuitive fashion, making it easy to navigate through, and providing search across an individual service (i.e. Flickr) or an aggregated view mixed-type content from different sources (via the Kinoma Guide). The information architecture of the app is very clean, elegant, and easily understandable, as it’s visible from the first screen you see when you start up:

 
The Kinoma Play home screen

 

So you’ve got your own media files (My Media Files), a curated list of podcasts, radio stations, books, etc. organized by genre (Kinoma Guide) , the ability to search any individual service or the guide (Search), a list of services each with their own landing page and special features (Services), and (not shown) access to a history of items you’ve viewed (History) and things you’ve earmarked as a favorite (Favorites).

 

Kinoma Guide 

The Kinoma Guide, as far as I can tell, is an aggregated portal which provides access publicly available podcast directories scattered across the web. In addition to bringing it all to one place, Kinoma does a good job of organizing these podcasts by theme, which makes it much easier to browse and discover new feeds you didn’t know about:

Kinoma Guide organized by theme

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts from throughout the guide. Sometimes the streaming can be a bit choppy, but if you catch it in a good mood, it’s very smooth.

 

Local Media Files

How does Kinoma handle my local media files?:

My Media Files 

 

The first time you start the Kinoma, it scans the device for movies and pictures and indexes these for search. Why is this useful? Because the Kinoma media player is better than the native one on WinMo. It’s got a really nice pan and zoom interface that indicates what part of the photo you’re zoomed in on:

Zoomed in photo with overview showing focused area

 

Uploading Content

Also, Kinoma enables seamless upload via services you’ve registered  with the device and via email accounts you’ve registered with Windows Mobile’s mail application:

Kinoma lets you send content to a specific service, or via an email account registered with Windows

Kinoma Flickr upload interface provides an throughtfully trimmed down set of options

Kinoma has it’s own mail UI, and doesn’t even punt you to you to the system’s mail UI. Talk about full vertical integration!

Service Integration

Kinoma supports lots of different services, making for a really rich ecosystem of  content comprised of user-generated content, literature, recorded lectures, public radio,  commercial radio … you name it, they’ve got it. Included in the services screen is Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, Orb, Shoutcast, and YouTube.

A list of services accessible from Kinoma

Note that you can actually search a superset of services which are listed in the “Services” screen shown above:

Search different services

Pop-up search box is used consistently throughout the UI

 
 Example: Flickr Support

For example, Google Images appears as a search-able option, but doesn’t appear in the “Services” tab. I think this means that it’s ‘read-only’; you can’t register your Picasa account with Kinoma the same way you can register your Flickr account and upload to Flickr directly from within Kinoma. So let’s see what accessing Flickr is like from the Kinoma client. Here’s what happens after I’ve registered my Flickr account with Kinoma (b.t.w. it automatically issues a request to Flickr and pops up the mobile browser for you to authenticate – convenient!):

Flickr control panel

It’s possible to search right from a pop-up box, or I can access my account on Flickr: photos I’ve uploaded, groups I belong to, photos I’ve favorited, etc.They’ve done a good job of paring down all the possible use cases to the ones that would be most important.

I can access all the public feeds available on the Flickr site (and accessible through their API):

Leveraging Flickr’s public API

Here, I’ve dug through “My Photos” to get to my photo sets, which Kinoma dynamically queries Flickr for and pulls them down, displaying them in a format optimized for my device:

My Flickr sets

And now, in slideshow mode, looking at multiple photos in a set:

Browsing through photos in full-screen mode

The cool thing that comes out of Kinoma knowing all about Flickr and what it’s capabilities are, is that I can edit my photos’ metadata on Flickr right from within the Kinoma app without having to visit the Flickr web page. These are accessible from a content menu (right soft key):

Context menu lets you perform Flickr-specific operations

Responsiveness and Feedback

Now, in the course of drilling down from Flickr -> My Photos -> My Sets -> <Some Set> -> <Some Photo in Set>, there is a lot of network activity going on. Although Kinoma does a good job of caching content (I’ve noticed some performance increase the second time i perform an operation), to provide the best possible experience, it is dynamically pinging Flickr’s API to get the most up-to-date info. This is not as seamless as I’d like it to be (can the internet ever be fast enough?!? ), as my device is running over T-Mobile’s data network … yet  don’t get nearly as frustrated as I would get, if Kinoma didn’t do an incredible job of providing feedback to the user as to what is currently going on.

From an interaction design perspective, I find it phenomenal that they’ve (i.e. the Kinoma developers / designers) given as much attention as they have to providing user feedback for each and every operation that the user requests. The use a semi-transparent status box at the bottom of the screen to relay information to the user, and a series of  informative status messages (”Buffering 70.2K”, “Loading”) make sure that the user is not left scratching their head in confusion or worse, banging their phone in frustration:

Fetching the full resolution photo  

Connecting to Google Photos to find an additional page of friggin’ adorable puppies

I don’t even know what this one means, but it makes me feel good that Kinoma is doing it for me!

 
 

Placeholder indicates there is one more puppy invited to this party

Navigation and Context Menus

I want to spend a bit of time talking about  navigation through the Kinoma app, and the contextual menu system. As you can see in the screenshot above, the left soft key (LSK) is mapped to back. It always goes to the back screen. One thing Kinoma does nicely is to provide smooth transitions between screens, so that you don’t blink, then all of a sudden forget where you are. This is a very subtle effect, but well executed, aesthetically pleasing, and useful: 

One screen slides out, the next screen slides in. Fancy stuff.

The RSK brings up the options menu. As options menus tend to work, the options displayed are contextually relevant. One thing Kinoma does nicely that most mobile OSs don’t do, is that the options are grouped not with horizontal dividers, but actually physically seperated into tabs, based on scope and function:

    

Context menu tabbed interface

While my mental model of how the options menus are organized isn’t fully baked, here’s my working assumptions. Actions in the first tab (Media) are media agnostic; they can be performed on media no matter where it’s from and what it is. Stuff in the second tab (Settings) has to do with overall settings of the Kinoma app. Stuff in the third tab here (Flickr) is specific to whatever service the content is hosted on (see Flickr menu above which shows Commenting and Add Tags). Stuff in the fourth tab has to do specifically with the media type and how it can be used locally on the device (”Set as Background”, “Set Contact Picture”). In addition to this thoughtful organization scheme, the context menus have a nice animation; they seem to spring out of the RSK and also do a 3D-rotatey-thing when you swap between tabs. I appreciate this kind of gratuitous fun (I’m easily amused)!

Conclusion

I’ve only been using Kinoma for a short amount of time, and haven’t had very many problems so far. Sometimes the network is slow, and podcasts fail all together or come in choppy, but this is probably T-Mobile’s fault and not Kinoma’s. One problem I do consistently run into though, is that when the network fails once (i.e. when I’m in an elevator), the Kinoma app won’t be able to get a handle on the network, even if the phone does have reception, and I continually get a “No Network Interface” error until I restart the app. The ironic thing here is that when you receive this error, the RSK is mapped to what looks like an ‘envelope’ icon. Pressing this will automatically format an error report of what went wrong and send it presumably back to Kinoma. Great idea, but doesn’t work so well when the error you’ve received is “No Network Interface.” A+ for effort though – great idea, and I’m sure that over time this will result in a higher rate of bug squashing.

Something else I’m concerned about is the battery life. It seems to degrade more rapidly than normal when Kinoma app is running (taking up 7 or so MB or RAM!), even if it’s not actually playing anything. To compound this, I don’t see a way to exit from within the application; instead I need to go to Task Manager and “End Task” from there. That seems rather klugey, especially if battery life is an issue, as it always is on a mobile device. 

All said, this is a great product, well-worth the cost, and I look forward to filling all those ten-minute spans of downtime in my days with TED Talks, This American Life, and whatever meme happens to be bouncing around YouTube at the time.  

Related posts:

1. Dashwire is a solid mobile synch solution

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 12:34 am and is filed under Mobile Technology, Multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.