Showing posts with label SlingPlayer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SlingPlayer. Show all posts

Friday, January 4, 2008

SlingPlayer for BlackBerry


And you thought BlackBerry was an enteprise email device! Sling Media has announced that SlingPlayer Mobile software will run on RIM BlackBerry smart phones. Sling Media will release SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry later this year.

SlingPlayer Mobile will be available for a one-time charge of $29.99. If you're thinking about doing this, make sure you have a device with Wi-Fi, such as the Curve. Sure, you might be able to watch using your carrier's data plan. But depending on where you are, and who your carrier is, the results might not be worth bothering with. Even Wi-Fi connections are going to be difficult in hotel and other settings.

If you are tempted to do this in the office, remember that IT is going to figure out pretty quickly that network congestion has gone way up, and why.

Friday, September 28, 2007

SlingPlayer for Symbian Phones


The SlingPlayer for Symbian S60 phones is out of beta and now available for sale. The software allows a selection of Nokia phones to stream television from any Slingbox.

SlingPlayer works on U.S. models of the Nokia E65, N75, and N95. It works on in the Nokia E65, N73, and 6120 handsets elsewhere. It already is available for Windows Mobile devices.

The Symbian software will cost $30 in the U.S., C$35 in Canada, and £20 in the U.K. market. The fee might be waived for U.S. Nokia N95 buyers. A free 30-day trial version will be made available. The Symbian SlingPlayer joins versions already available for Windows Mobile and Palm OS products, as well as Windows and Mac computers.

Still missing from the list of supported devices is the BlackBerry, although that undoubtedly is in the works. Of course, one sort of questions why, in a rhetorical I sense. Obviously Sling would want access to the large installed base of BlackBerries.

The issue is that the BlackBerry really isn't a very good media player, though it excels for email, obviously. If it is me, I would use the Nokia N95, which is a killer media player. I wouldn't use the N95 as my email device, however.

The point is that we are getting to a time when mobile devices really have to be optimized for one or just a couple applications: no single device is the best at all functions. To my way of thinking N95 is an iPhone, even without the touchscreen interface. Neither device makes any sense to me as an email device.

I was kicking around ideas with Stan Little over at Glenayre recently and he is experimenting with the notion that a person's identity increasingly can be tied to a single device. And he's right about identity. Whether that identity can effectively be broadened to encompass all the really important parts of a user's "life" roles, preferences, moods and tastes is more debatable. Stan is more optimistic about that than I am at the moment.

My issue with the single device is not, I suppose, so much with the "identity" so much as with the ability of any single device to competently handle all the tasks. I just can't see the email/work function and the media player function being something a single device does at a "best of breed" level in both scores. And it isn't so clear that any device optimized for either email or media playing is going to work as the absolute best "phone." The BlackBerry is adequate as a phone. But it isn't great.

Maybe we need a more robust version of a Subscriber Information Module so we can port the identities to whichever device makes the most sense "at the moment."

"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"

Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...