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Review: Audible for Pocket PC

Version 1.

What is Audible? Audible is a company providing copyright protected audio books and possibility to listen to these audio backs in mobile devices like MP3 players and PDAs and smartphones: Windows Mobile for Pocket PC (interviewed here), Windows Mobile for Smartphone (still in BETA version but already available) and for PalmOS based PDAs and phones. There is no version of Audible for Symbian, so you shouldn´t buy Symbian phones!.

To sign-up for Audible and to download software from Audible click here.

The most important part of Audible is "AudibleManager", which is a program for PC or Mac:

To see above screen shot in 1 to 1 scale click here.

With AudibleManager one can listen to audio books inside of your PC or Mac and one can copy the audio books to your mobile device:

Screen shots above show also transfering audio books to Pocket PC and please note that you can transfer your audio books also to storage card, so you can take advantage of SD cards that are availale very cheaply also in sizes of 1GB !

Please note, that there are various Audible formats with various sound quality : 1, 2, 3 and 4. However format 4 is not usable in mobile devices:

... if you want to play software in higher quality you can use some audio capturing software (for example like this one) to copy audio books to an open (not copyprotected) MP3 format!

Inside of Pocket PC the Audible player looks like this and it makes it possible to listen to audio books inside of your Pocket PC:

In audio program selection dialog:

... you can see more details about each audio books, including textual and graphic information.

If you don´t like the default skin for the Audible mobile player, you can make your own:

Here is the version of the audible player that we are reviewing here:

Listening to audio books can take sometimes several hours, so here are some options for power conservation, so that you can use your Pocket PC longer:

Conclusions: Audible works fine with Windows Mobile and since it is not available for Symbian phones, our point is clear: by buying a Windows Mobile phone you are buying device that you can use not just to make phone calls but also a device, with which you can listen to audio books and thanks to the fact that the Audible player runs there inside of the phone, you are sure that you will not miss any incoming phone call too...