SmartMovie 2.71

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SmartMovie 2.71

Aalaap Ghag, Feb 20, 2005 0000 hrs IST

All the movie madness on the 7710 was thanks to a third-party application called SmartMovie

Very easy to use, Fast conversion, Ability to split and join clips

Doesn't support certain files, Not able to load all subtitles, Not free

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My Nokia 7710 review was almost focused entirely on multimedia and movie playback - most of the actual phone features didn't come in till the second half of the review. In there, I mentioned that the 7710 has no out-of-the-box movie playback capability, unless you make itsy-bitsy 3gp files with mono sound. All the movie madness on the 7710 was thanks to a third-party application called SmartMovie, developed by Lonely Cat Games.

SmartMovie is a media player for mobile devices running Symbian OS, Pocket PC / Windows Mobile and Palm OS, which more or less covers all the next-gen PDAs, phones and hybrids out there. Specifically about Symbian OS, it runs on Series 60 (Nokia 3650, 3660, 6600, 6260, 7610, etc; Siemens SX1; Sendo X etc), Series 80 (Nokia 9300, 9500), Series 90 (Nokia 7710), UIQ (Sony-Ericsson P800, 900, 910, 910i; Motorola A920, A925, A1000).

Since most of the devices run a low-powered processor (not more than 150-200 MHz, in terms of clock speed), it's not fair to expect them to play desktop format 700 MB DivX or XviD files (with the exception of the XDA-class PDAs), the movies need to be converted to a phone-friendly format and that's often a big question mark for the average user who can't be bothered about running the movie through a train of encoders and post-processors just to get a simple thing done: play the movie on my phone!

SmartMovie provides a converter that takes care of the problem for newbies and also for pros who would rather spend their time and expertise on other things! The "LCG Mobile Video Converter" comes bundled with every SmartMovie download. There's a different converter for each platform, simply due to the difference in screen sizes of the devices. We tried out SmartMovie on the Nokia 7710, so the screenshots here are all taken on that phone.

The converter handles almost all the editing and processing feats you'd want while converting a movie for playback on the phone. It lets you select only a small portion of the file to encode, which is useful when you're running out of space, or just want to have a bit of a movie. It also lets you select several different clips of a movie and create your own one contiguous clip. Pick out the best bits to play in your pocket!