The Cynic Says……

No, not the techno band “The Orb”… There’s this really neat site called orb.com that I recently discovered after I got my XV6700. Basically it allows you to setup your home PC as sort of a media server, thus allowing you to stream media content on your PC (videos, pics, music, recorded TV shows) to anywhere else you please. All you do is create an account on the orb website, download the orb program and run it on your PC. You then set it up to point to wherever you have all your media, which it then indexes. Then, when you want to stream it from somewhere else, you just login to the orb website from that location and it basically allows you to browse the content on your PC and stream it from wherever you are. The best part is that you’re not limited to just streaming it from other PC’s; you can actually stream it from mobile phones, PDA’s connected via wi-fi, smartphones, etc. Basically any internet connected device can stream the content provided it has a compatible media player. It can re-encode your files into one of three formats: windows media (wma, wmv, mp3, etc), real media and 3gpp2. Obviously, running a windows mobile 5 device I’d pick windows media since WM5 includes Windows Media Player 10. I don’t have realplayer installed either at work or on my XV6700 so I don’t know how well real media works… and I don’t have anything that plays 3gpp2 either. 3gpp2 would be the best (only?) option for regular cellphones (non smartphones) and real media would most likely be the best choice for Symbian-based phones. I tried it out on both my phone connected via Verizon’s EVDO network and my PC at work and it worked great on both. Verizon’s data speeds absolutely suck in the area in which I work, so it buffered quite a bit… However, it worked ok overall and I think it’d work great if I was in an area with better data speeds (1 mile in any direction, for example). Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the service so far… Plus it’s free, so who’s to complain?