The Two Inch View

Where Personal Entertainment Has Been, and Where It’s Going

June 5th, 2006 Jason Dunn

To understand where Windows Mobile media and entertainment is now, I think it’s important to understand what came before. Looking back on the history of when portable devices met personal entertainment, there are several notable devices. The first such device might be the portable radio. Initial radios were large, bulky devices that stayed in the living room of a home. They evolved into small, handheld devices that could be carried anywhere. The appeal? Music wherever you were, but the personal aspect was limited to the owner making a choice of which radio station to listen to. If you didn’t like what was on the radio, you didn’t have much of a choice.

The Sony Walkman TPS-L. Image courtesy of Sony History

Portable radios evolved into one the most popular portable entertainment devices of all time: the Sony Walkman. What made the walkman so popular so quickly? It blended the personalization of cassette tapes with the portability factor of a handheld radio. The combination of those two elements is what led to the explosive popularity. The Sony Walkman was first introduced in 1979 as the “Sound about” and was estimated to sell 5,000 units per month. Just two months after its release, ten times that amount (50,000) were being sold every month in Japan. When it made its way to North America, it quickly became a cultural icon.

Fast forward to today, and we have a huge assortment of digital audio players (commonly referred to as “DAP”), all bringing the same key ingredients as the original Walkman: they play back the content the user wants to listen to, and they are small enough to be portable. Almost every major, and minor, player in the computer and consumer electronics industry has stepped onto the field with everything from minuscule cube DAPs with flash memory to paperback book-sized media players with 100 gigabyte hard drives. The iPod is the market leader in hard drive-based players at the moment, but they have a lot of competition from some very determined industry players, so there’s plenty of choice.

A new generation of Windows Mobile Portable Media Centers, such as the Toshiba Gigabeat S, will blend the consumer friendly PMC interface with powerful synchronization options - all in a package that’s small and functional enough to go head to head with any portable media player on the market.

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Welcome to the Two Inch View

June 1st, 2006 Jason Dunn

Welcome to this new blog, dedicated to Windows Mobile media and entertainment. And in case you didn’t get it, the site name comes from the screen sizes of some of these devices. “The Five Inch View” just didn’t sound as cool. Coverage will be focused purely on Windows Mobile devices, which includes Smartphones, Pocket PCs, and of course Portable Media Centers. My role here is to dig up interesting news items, write columns and tutorials about how to get the most out of your devices, and present you with reviews of great new hardware and software. Because this is a Microsoft Windows Mobile sponsored blog (as in, they pay for it), I’m hoping to get interviews with key people on Microsoft teams to bring you the inside track on where things are headed. I’m going to focus more on quality than quantity here. This is not going to be a high-volume news blog – for that, look to the other sites that I work on, Pocket PC Thoughts, Smartphone Thoughts, and Digital Media Thoughts. This is also not meant to be a full-blown community site, hence the lack of forums. This is a simple blog, but I believe it will serve a useful purpose in the Windows Mobile world.

Because of the Microsoft sponsorship on this project, this site is 100% advertising free: no affiliate links, no banners, no text ads, nothing. Our RSS feeds are full text, and the site is on a different (faster) server than my Thoughts Media sites. In addition to this gorgeous layout, the designer, Fabrizio Fiandanese, put a lot of effort into making this site as readable as possible on a number of devices and browsers - there’s a full mobile version as well, so you can read it from your Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphones. Try a Print Preview from your browser just for fun - you’ll like the results. This is useful if you want to PDF any of the articles. It should be a great user experience - enjoy!

My hope for this blog is that you, the reader, will learn what Windows Mobile devices are capable of when it comes to media and entertainment, and how to maximize the value of what you already own. I’ve been involved in this industry since 1996, when the first clamshell Windows CE-based handheld PCs (HPCs) came onto the market. I’ve seen these devices grow from being basic personal information management (PIM) devices to being full-blown powerhouses with amazing communication and entertainment functionality. The mobile device market is booming, and the future is very bright for Windows Mobile. Stick around, and be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed – this is going to be fun!

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