So you have your Windows Mobile phone in one pocket, ready to take calls, and in the other pocket is… what, your MP3 player of choice, perhaps one that even streams YouTube videos and plays synced podcasts or records audio? Why do you carry a phone capable of playing music already and an MP3 player? Because your phone doesn’t specialize in music or video playback. Well now it can, and BETTER and FASTER than the iPhone, all because of Kinoma Play!

Kinoma Play is the product of 3 years of hard work and that hard work shows, it’s a clean app and the first time I used it I knew that it was made by professionals. I had the privilege of speaking with Charles Wiltgen, Kinoma’s Director of Social Marketing, and he gave me insight into the wonderful application that is Kinoma Play.

At its most basic function Kinoma Play is a media player. The first time you run Play it scans your device and puts all your media into order in the app itself so you can easily find what you are looking for and open it directly from Play, be it music, pictures, movies, playlists, or documents. The interface is very “Apple-esque” and reminds me a lot of my iPod Touch; it’s very simple and easy to find things. You can also search through your media directly from the “My Media Files” menu, a great touch to the interface. But there are hundreds of media players for Windows Mobile, and they all play movies, music, and some even show your pictures. So what makes Kinoma Play different? The Guide.

The Kinoma Guide is a powerful aggregator that goes out to all kinds of sites and feeds and pulls them all together for you to listen and watch. Want to hear an audiobook? Well just go to the Audiobooks and Literature channel in the guide where you can sign into Audible.com and listen to books you’ve already bought, streamed directly to your device, or listen to one of the hundreds of free books on LibriVox. Perhaps live radio is more of your thing, then check out the Radio channel. You can listen to one of the thousands of channels on the Clear Channel network, Fox News, Radio Disney, NPR Stations, and many more. What’s that, you like Sports? Got it. Technophile? Yup, plenty of podcasts to take care of your techno-lust. Weather? Uh huh. Religion? There’s even a Religious channel on here. There is half a terabyte of content on the Guide at any one time and it’s ALWAYS changing!

You want more? Okay, here’s what Kinoma did — they threw in syncing with services. Yes, you can send the pictures you take on your device to Flickr, the videos you record to YouTube, or if you have a MobileMe account with Apple you can even sync with that. As soon as you send that picture or movie it’s on the web. Yes, as soon as the progress bar fills up you can email your buddy and show him that picture you took last night.

If you are interested in trying Kinoma Play before parting with $20 for a license, there is a free version on the site as well, which has everything that the normal one but is more focused on YouTube, podcasts and photos. Charles assured me that Kinoma works with most Windows Mobile phones, but if you do have problems you can reach him on their forums or on Twitter.

Here’s a few videos on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/kinomaplay

When I first created this site it was to do reviews of Windows Mobile Apps. I have a Windows Mobile Phone (HTC Touch from Alltel) and I enjoy finding new apps to use on it, unfortunately there aren’t many apps that come out for WM phones on a regular basis. One of the ways I get ideas to review apps, besides word of mouth, is through a service that sends out “press releases” of new apps and programs and I get a lot of these releases a week but I have to turn 99% of them down because they aren’t Windows Mobile related.

Well, I bought an iPod Touch and looking for apps on it are becoming another favorite pasttime when I’m not working or looking for new things for my phone. So an idea popped into my head the other day — I need to review more than just Windows Mobile Apps, I need to review all mobile apps. Expect more reviews, of both Windows Mobile Apps and iPhone/iPod Touch Apps, in the future. And if anyone can get me a G1 to review Android Apps it would be great!

If you have Alltel I’m sure you are gnawing at your fingernails to get some action with Windows Mobile 6.1, like I was. Forum posts at PPCGeeks.com and XDA-Developers.com have been promising ROM updates from Alltel for weeks but with nothing to show once the promised date arrived. I’ve been following the posts since the announcement from HTC that there would be an update available and finally decided that since Alltel wouldn’t release anything I would get a cooked ROM from the real developers — the users.

I knew that I wanted the HTC Touch Pro interface, dubbed Manilla 2D, mainly for the ease of access it gave to everything, something that the normal Windows Mobile interface lacks. So I went with Conflipper’s Manilla 2D Alltel 6.1 ROM and I haven’t looked back on the 6.0 ROM at all. It was a simple process (especially for someone who had never flashed a cooked ROM before) and took all of 2 hours.

If you are on Alltel and want to update the instructions and all the files are here: http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=33359. Follow the instructions and everything will work out A-OK. If you have problems the great community at PPCGeeks will try their best to help you out.

Over on XDA Developers someone has taken a bootable copy of Linux and made it run Android, that’s right, Google Android, on Windows Mobile phones. It’s a simple hack to run and easy to install. Get all the files and follow the instructions on this site and you should be in business.

Remember this will be a bit buggy and you won’t be able to get to all your applications or your contacts (found this out through my own discovery). On my HTC Touch the right directional button opened up context menus, the left directional button went back to the previous screen, and the camera button brought up the onscreen keyboard. I sent and received an SMS with no problem but when I told an incoming call to go to voicemail the vibrate in my phone stuck and I had to take the battery out to restart it.

The distro runs in RAM so you don’t have to worry about it running all the time, all you have to do to quit it is to perform a soft reset and you will be back to WM. But any time you are ready to show off your Android phone, just run the Haret boot loader and in a few minutes you will be ready to wow.

(This isn’t a Windows Mobile-specific application, but it is such an awesome product I couldn’t give up the chance to write about it.)

So, your child comes home and you ask her how school was, she replies with “fine” and walks out of the room. This of course is the typical answer and you wanted a less generic one so you pull out your cell phone and send a text message to your child’s school and in a few moments you have a message with all your child’s up-to-date grades. Now, don’t start pulling out your cellphone right away, but this may be in the future for your school, and many other businesses, in the near future. How, you ask? Well, thanks to Nick Bolton and Mobile Data Now, you will be able to get data from any company by SMS, IM, and Email very soon.

I got the chance to talk with Nick over the phone the other night (Nick is in New Zealand so it was around lunch a day ahead of me there) about his new application and he sounded very excited about his product. Truthfully, when I first heard about Mobile Data Now, all I could see it in was a business situation, suits and all, but after talking to Nick I saw all the possibilities that could open up with Mobile Data Now.

The idea is simple: A company, group, or organization sets up a server that will intercept the messages received and installs Mobile Data Now (MDN) on it, MDN now takes that message and runs the query on the server. Once the query is run the reply is sent immediately and the user has her information right when she needs it. The service can be set up to receive messages from “named” users, users specifically named in MDN’s admininstration console, or it can receive and process messages from anyone, making MDN a very versatile system to get information out to as few or many people as your organization needs. Nick also said that in the next version you will be able to access web services (such as Amazon to search for book prices).

MDN is free to download and use for one user, all you need is an SMS Modem (if you want to use the SMS functionality) and a PC running either Windows XP, Windows Server 2000 or Windows Vista. Linux and Mac support is coming soon, Nick said. If your organization is larger than one user, you’ll need to contact their sales department for pricing.

If you have anyquestions about Mobile Data Now, you can contact Nick Bolton. I’m sure he would be more than happy to help you with any questions you might have about MDN.

For years the eastern world have been using QR (Quick Response) Codes to point users in the right direction, bringing them URLs, contact information, and text at the scan of a 2D barcode. But us in the west have been blissfully unaware of all that QR Codes can do for us, up until now. There are more places adopting QR Codes, especially online where it is easy to make your own code for whatever need you might have, and for those of us with Windows Mobile phones it’s been hard finding an app that will read the codes as most of them are in Java. But, fear not young technophile, I-nigma has brought a reader forward that just might do the job!

The I-nigma Reader is an application for Windows Mobile and does exactly what it was meant to — read and decrypt QR Codes to make them useable. Just download the app to your device, install, and run. The only screen, besides options, is the camera viewer, which you need to scan in your code. You don’t have to perfectly line up the code for the reader to pick it up and decrypt, actually it will probably decrypt and display the code’s message before you even get the whole QR Code in the viewer, just move it towards it and let the app do the rest. It will then switch to a display page where it will let you open the URL, display the message, call the number, or whatever else the QR Code is encrypted to show.

The reader works, that’s it, it just works. The only gripe I have about it is that it flips the camera over so you have to kind of work upside-down and backwards, so it’s a little different at first. Other than that, though, it’s a great little app that does what it does wonderfully. I-nigma Reader is freeware from I-nigma, no strings attached. You can check to see if your device is supported here, although it seems that pretty much all phones are.

Also, if you would like to make your own QR Codes for your site, publication, or whatever else, I-nigma has a free code creator that generates the codes on the fly. There’s also this one by Kaywa.com, it has a few more options.

It’s easy to take a photo or video on your phone and then send it in a MMS to a friend, or even multiple friends, but it’s not as easy to take that same picture and post it to Twitter or Photobucket. Sure you can go online and upload it, plug your phone into your computer and download it, or send it to yourself in an email, but there just has to be a better way! Enter Shozu, an undercover app that, like a stealthy ninja, sends your pictures to your online photo hosting sites as soon as you take them.

It takes opening Shozu twice to actually get to the app the first time you use it, this is because the first time you open it you are starting it and every time after that you are opening the app. Of course you don’t have to open the app to use it every time, when you take a picture Shozu pops up and asks if you would like to send it to your photo hosting page right away (This is a wonderful idea as I generally forget to send the photos to the sites after I’ve taken them).

Shozu currently supports photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, PhotoBucket, Twitter, Friendster, Kodak Easyshare Gallery, Picasa and more! Also, Shozu supports blogging sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, and Wordpress (plus others!), a few citizen journalism sites (e.g., BBC News, CNN, etc.), and FTP and email. If you want to send your photo somewhere more than likely Shozu supports the site or plans on supporting it in the future.

You can read more about the freeware app, Shozu, or you can go ahead and sign up right away! Shozu is definitely worth the time to sign up and get this service on your mobile phone. Shozu is currently supported on most mobile phones with a camera, but you may wish to check for availability on your phone. Remember, Shozu uses a data connection to upload and download files so it is best to get an unlimited data service from your provider.

Recently I’ve begun reading books on my HTC Touch just because of the ease and always having the book on-hand, but I ran into a problem with Word (the built-in resource for ebooks): when I quit Word I lost my place. I searched and searched for some way to bookmark my place in Word and finally gave up and resigned myself to getting a third-party ebook reader, settling on uBook Reader by GowerPoint.

uBook Reader really shines through as a reader, it can display pretty much any document file as well as image files. Of course it really helped me out when I would close the application and then return and was greeted with the same page I had exited with. The user interface is very nice, although not very touch friendly, and covers all of the Windows Mobile UI; also most of the UI is customizable — a huge plus. To choose a book you must click (or touch) the Start button and then choose “Open”, you won’t be greeted with your normal open dialog but a built-in screen that, once you get used to it, is a bit confusing.

After opening the book you will see your book and you can begin to read (if you are using the demo version you will be shown the uBook splash page every few pages to remind you that you aren’t using a registered copy). When you are ready to quit reading just click the Start button and choose “Exit”, there is no “x” button at the top right to press (the Go button will show the WM taskbar if you need to get to it without exiting uBook Reader).

Overall, uBook Reader is wonderful to use with a few quirks, but most have workarounds if you play with the app long enough. You can pick up a copy yourself at GowerPoint’s website for $15.

Sure the contact app for Windows Mobile 6 is pretty good, especially if you are running a touch device and can flick through your contacts, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a few contacts that you call all the time on your Today screen? And then wouldn’t it be even more nice to be able to call and sms straight from your Today screen as well? Look no further, the Face Contact plugin does all of this and more!

Face Contact is a today screen plugin designed by CNetX that allows you to flick through pictures of your contacts on the Today screen, like you do with your contacts’ names in the contact list, and choose how you will contact them. Through the plugin you can call, SMS, email, or visit the contact’s webpage, all of which you set up like normal — all you have to do is add the contact to the plugin via the “Add Contact” button in Face Contact’s settings and off you go!

You can download a 10-day evaluation copy of Face Contact or go ahead and buy your own license for $14.95!