MP3: The Definitive Guide

Hand-Held Computers and Other Devices

Necessity is the mother, and MP3 is a necessity for many people. But not everybody can afford to buy a dedicated portable, since they already spent this year’s geektoy budget on a PDA or other hand-held device. Fortunately, the popularity of MP3 is driving the extension of some existing devices to support the format. The list here is short, but expect MP3 support to find its way into nearly anything that has a CPU and can conceivably play audio in the near future. In fact, Ericsson had just announced a cell phone with MP3 playback capability via an add-in cartridge at press time.

Utopiasoft’s Hum

http://www.utopiasoft.comThis one isn’t actually a portable MP3 player, but, a skinnable software system for WinCE-based handheld computers that lets you play MP3 files directly through your PDA (Figure 6.8). Of course, most PDAs ship with a very limited amount of memory, and much of what’s there is already occupied by the operating system, applications, and your data. That means Hum probably won’t be useful unless you’re using add-in CompactFlash memory cards, which are currently available in capacities up to 96 MB.

The Hum software utilizes a technology called AdaptivePlay. If your device has a slow CPU, or is busy handling tasks for other applications, or does not have high-quality media capabilities, audio processing is bumped down to 22kHz automatically. When more computing resources become available to the device, quality jumps back up to the ...