Hi all,
I got my PAC Mate Omni on Friday and wanted to post my impressions of it as
a media player. I've been having a lot of fun with it. It does everything
my iPod did, except that it is 100% accessible. I can finally have the
library interface that the iPod has, but be able to switch to a specific
song if I want to hear it, which happens to me a lot when I have it in
shuffle mode.
I have thought for a while that in order to have something truly equivalent
to the iPod, a portable media player would need to have a screen reader.
Since people can cary large amounts of audio content with them thanks to
high capacity hard drives and flash memory, I find that being able to
organize it into a library is invaluable to me. I find it much easier than
the file tree interface that rock box uses, or at least it did last time I
used it. Switching between playing songs in random order and ordered play,
as well as playing a specific track are all easily done. You can also go
into the menu and view the properties of the currently playing track, great
for when you've got it on shuffle and you hear a song you don't recognize
but that you like. You can find out who the artist is, the name of the
album and the track name, so you can find it and play it later. That
happens to me all the time.
I like it so much that my 30 gig iPod Video went up on Ebay last weekend. I
don't feel I have any use for the iPod now that I have the PMO, one less
device I have to take with me. It is true that the PAC Mate is a lot bigger
than the iPod, but I'd rather have something that is bigger and be able to
know what I'm listening to, than have the iPod and have to hunt around for a
certain song I want to hear. The only things I don't like are the size of
the PAC Mate, and that it is not iTunes compadible. That would just be
nice, but it's not a big deal to me. You can, however play tracks purchased
from places like Napster on the PAC Mate Omni, provided that you transfer it
via Windows Media Player. Transferring via WMP works pretty good, but I'm
still trying to figure it out. I've been spoiled by iTunes automatically
updating my iPod. I might have to look into using Napster now, if they have
prepaid cards like iTunes does.
It'd be interesting to know how the PAC Mate Omni stacks up to one of those
Nokia N mobile phones with Talks, like the N91/N95, since they are
supposedly designed to be PMPs. I got the impression from this list that
that is a good way to listen to music on the go because Talks/Mobile Speak
gives you feedback as to what's on the screen. Same with a Windows Mobile
Smart Phone, like the Motorola Q running Mobile Speak Smartphone or Smart
Hal, or a Pocket PC running Mobile Speak Pocket/pocket Hal.
I thought about recording a demo of the PAC Mate Omni as a media player, but
I don't have a good set up to do that, so I don't think it'd give people a
good idea of the power that it has. I don't have anything to plug the PAC
Mate into that would make it sound better for an audio demo.
Just some thoughts. Brian, have you thought about putting up some stuff on
the portable player portal on mobile phones/PDA's as media players?
Brian Giles
More information about portable media devices can be obtained from the Portable
Player Portal. Please visit
www.hartgen.org
and choose the Portable Player Portal link.
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