Here is one of my favorite apps for Symbian S60, CorePlayer Mobile. The distinctive feature of this app is that it can play back a huge amount of audio and video formats. The newer releases allow you to stream FLV files from YouTube in a superb quality as long as your phone hardware allows it. Because of its capabilities to play back many different file formats you don’t have to convert your media files anymore. You still have to watch out for VGA resolution videos with high bitrates since even CorePlayer can’t play them back because of the insufficient hardware power of your phone.
These formats are supported by CorePlayer mobile:
Audio: MP3, MP2, AAC, MKA, WMA, Midi, WAV, OGG, Speex, WAVPACK, TTA, FLAC, MPC, AMR, ADPCM, ALaw, MuLaw, G.729, GSM
Video: H.264 (AVC), AVCHD, MKV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 part 2 (ASP), DivX, XviD, Theora, Dirac, MJPEG, MSVIDEO1
Image: JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MJPEG
Containers: Flash/FLV, Matroska, ASF, ASX, AVI, PS, M2TS, TS, 3GPP, MOV, MPEG-4, OGM, NSV
Streaming: HTTP, UDP, UDP Multicast, UDP Unicast, RDP, RTP. RTSP, RTCP (keep alive), ASX, ASF, Multicast, HTTP Tunneling
At the moment CorePlayer is the only S60 application that can play back so many formats making your phone almost a portable media player. To make the media experience even better this player also supports A2DP but sadly it doesn’t feature hardware acceleration.
Now let’s have a brief look at the user interface. The UI is not really user friendly nor is it pretty. It feels a bit clunky overall. You have to click an unhealthy amount of times to just play back one file which is definitely not a pleasant experience.
When you enter the menu you have the possibility to open a file with the aid of a file browser. Some other things you will find in the menu are tools, options, play/ pause etc.
In options you can change the play back speed of the media files, the orientation of the player, zoom, pixel aspect ratio and several other things. Tools allow you to set equalizers, customize the color settings, configure hotkeys and more.
You can access the YouTube client directly from CorePlayer’s main screen. The YouTube client allows you to search videos and arrange them according to date, views, popularity etc. In settings of the YouTube Client you are able to choose the preferred play back format and the quality like FLV (medium quality), FLV (high quality), H264 (normal quality) H264 (720P).
CorePlayer also has the standard options to create playlists and arrange the audio files according to genre, artist, album and year.
This application costs $29,95 and is therefore pretty expensive. It only pays off if you use this app regularly. Sadly there is no trial version for this. You can download it over at the CorePlayer Website.
Since this was just a brief review of this application you can ask questions regarding CorePlayer in our forum.
Related Posts:
Tags: App review, CorePlayer Mobile, Paid app