The Software

Software is the key to making a great mobile multimedia experience.  From a hardware perspective, many of today’s devices are comparable.  The goal of good software is to mask the complexities of getting multimedia onto your player of choice.   Apple has made it incredibly easy for customers, both experienced and novice alike, to get content into their iPods.  Microsoft is going to try and replicate that success with their upcoming Zune player and Windows Media Player 11 software due out later this year.  If Palm wants to play in this market space then they are going to have to weave together software solutions that make getting content on to a Palm handheld or Treo easier.

Using software to convert, or rip, CDs to mpeg-3 (.mp3) files has now become fairly straight forward.  Just about every jukebox player for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux allows you to convert your existing CDs to mpeg-3 files.  Once the tracks have been converted, all you need to do is copy the files to an SD card and you are ready to go.  By comparison, audio files are much smaller than video files so the time required to convert and transfer this is shorter.

Getting video on your Palm OS device is a bit more time consuming.  New hardware and software solutions are helping to make watching video on your Palm OS device easier.  Solutions like Sling Media’s Slingbox (for the Treo 700w and 700wx) and Tivo’s Series 2 box combined with the Tivo To Go client (Treo 650, 700p) allows you to watch TV shows and movies when ever and where ever you go.

There are other solutions for people who don’t have set top hardware boxes.  For the more of the do-it-yourself types, your entire DVD library is up for grabs when you use software like Pocket-DVD Studio or Fair Use Wizard.  Once you have your media converted, copy the resulting video file to your SD card, and you can use great media players like the Core Personal Media Player (TCPMP) or MMPlayer.

The Hardware

Software is only half of the solution.  Multimedia content takes up lots of space.  The higher the quality the audio or video file is, he more space it takes up on your device.  Palm’s love-it-or-hate-it LifeDrive Mobile Manager is a step in the right direction.  The LifeDrive was once described to me as being a wireless smart hard drive in which you can store all of your applications, data and media files.  The LifeDrive was also described by some of Palm’s higher ups as being somewhat experimental.

Palm did learn a few things from the LifeDrive.  If you are going to develop a smart hard drive, you are going to need lots of storage space.  When competing devices have internal hard drive that come in 20GB or more, a 4GB micro drive seems a bit anemic.  If Palm decides to do another device with a hard disk, they’ll need to include something a little bit roomier.  Hard drives are great, but what are Treo and Palm handheld owners suppose to do?  This is where third-party vendors come in.  The capacity of flash media cards are about to explode.  2GB SD cards are quickly becoming the norm.  4GB cards are here and their prices are dropping quickly.  Tomorrows cards will 32GB and larger.  Think about how many movies you’ll be able to store on a 32MB SD card.  You may have to start taking the long way to work just so you can watch all of the media that has been loaded on your card!

Conclusion

To wrap up, mobile media, while still a niche market, is gaining mass adoption as hardware and software become easier to use and companies like Microsoft and Apple push ever deeper into your home entertainment center.

The solutions that are available to day, while serviceable, still need some fine tuning to shield customers from the complexities of converting video for use on mobile devices.

When easy to use software is coupled with robust media players that are selling below the $500 price point, we’ll see more than just the members from the Cult of the While Ear Buds toting around mobile media players.