Review: ROK MMC Movie Player
Score:
70%
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
ROK made something of a splash late last year with the launch of their plans for properly licensed music and video content on MMC, for use on many Symbian OS smartphones. Now, full-screen video is nothing new to Series 60 (Makayama have been doing it for some time, with their DVD to smartphone utility), but this is the first time you don't have to get your hands dirty messing around with codecs, AVI files, and so on, staying 100% legal to boot.
Now the point of this sort of review is to look at software, so ROK very kindly sent me a copy of "The Ministry of Sound: Big Tunes: Living For The Weekend." And you know what, all I could hear in my head was "what happened to proper music, this is just noise, what’s wrong with three guitars, a bass and some drums." Arghh! So while my musical tastes don’t come close to Ministry of Sound (see my weekly Rock Show for what I do like), I’ll put my reviewing hat on and simply say that the content had a lot of sound and a lot of moving images of women with power tools.
On calling up the ROK Player icon, you get presented with a Series 60 style browser, and two folders – Audio and Video. So bonus points here straight away – as this is a Music Video Chip (or whatever they’ll end up being called) it’s possible to just listen to this on your headphones or hands free. Sound on its own is much less of a drain on your battery than both sound and video. Exactly the same tracks are in both folders, audio-wise, and this is a smart move. Not sure if this feature will be on the film chips, but ROK is obviously thinking about the user experience. The chips are DV-RS-MMC with an adaptor for regular MMC-using phones.
Okay, onto the video player. The first thing is that the screen is turned through 90 degrees to get a "widescreen-ish" view on the Series 60 screens. There are no configurable options (for example, which way the screen should be rotated for comfort), so it’s straight into the watching. In a way this is good, the software should be transparent, and the on screen hints at the "stopped" screen remind you of all the controls – which use the direction pad for volume and skipping forward and back.
Is it watchable? Yes, and definitely comfortable for a good length of time – I’m not sure what a full movie like The Shawshank Redemption is going to be like, but 30 minute TV programs (such as some of the comedies ROK is promoting) should be great content for bus and train journeys. There’s already a good choice of video applications out there, so what makes ROK attractive is not going to be the software, or the fact that they can encode a higher bitrate on files for newer Series 60 devices… It’s the simple fact that Content is King, and ROK are well on the way to having a nice catalogue of varied, legally-licensed titles.
So, if you’re going on a long trip and fancy something to watch without mucking around with other rip/convert/transfer utilities, it’s worth checking out if there’s a ROK title you’d be interested in, although at roughly the same cost as a full-price DVD the prices seem a touch steep.
ROK Player website and online catalogue.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at