I’ve been having a look (or should that be listen) to the music capabilities of the BenQ S6 MID device. With a stereo headphone socket and a music player as part of the built in software, the device can be used as a portable music player.

But is it any good?

A good music player needs to have a couple of areas where it has to perform. The audio quality, the navigation of music on the device, and transferring music from another computer.

Audio quality output is good, the speakers on the device happily fill my kitchen and taking it outside there’s enough volume to listen comfortably when in the park. It’s when you start listening on headphones that there’s a problem. The headphone socket (which also carries the microphone socket as well) is only a 2.5mm jack socket. The standard size on pretty much any consumer device is 3.5mm, and my favourite headphones (including my custom moulded monitors) are all that size. While you can get adaptors, I fail to see any design reasons to go for the smaller jack plug that benefits the end user.

Looking through your music on the device is not a pleasant task. Although all my MP3 files have the correct ID3 tags, with the artist, album, track numbers and album art, the S6 does not use any of that information. Once you open the media application and start navigating music, you are using the directory structure and filenames of the MP3 files, with little option to search through the meta-information.

The controls only show up on the screen when you tap the play icon next to a media file – this places the controls over the the screen for a few seconds before disappearing again. It’s not at all intuitive. What’s more, once you switch away from the media player, there are no on-screen controls you can pop up to control the music.

Finally, transferring music to the device. I had to resort to using a blue tooth transfer from my PC to get a connection to the memory card or internal memory of the S6. While I know many people will be able to do this, it is not a consumer ready solution.

Compare the hoops you have to jump through when compared to the iPod Touch and iTunes, the ease of controlling the music, and searching through with your eyes or filters, and you realise that the BenQ has some work to do to make the S6 acceptable as a music player.

Steve has already talked about the camera quality on the Compal MID today, but I wanted to quickly mention the video quality. I think I’d agree with him that video side is a little disappointing.

“Video quality on the device I have here isn’t up to the same quality as the images unfortunately. The quality is low-end smartphone level and should really be much better,” wrote Steve.

I think the first thing to note is that video in a MID device has two core uses. The first is video telephony, especially online using IM services such as Skype. In that sense having a small screen and sometimes poor definition is expected, and thus the Compal is comparable to the built in camera on mid-range laptops. Unless I specifically say that I’m on a MID device, video chatting

It’s when you look at recording and editing video for upload to services like YouTube or Vimeo that the Compal starts to fail. The video that I have recorded on the Compal, even when viewed on the device, has a habit of the audio being out of sync with the video. That’s not something that is acceptable for any sort of internet video work.

This is something I see in many devices, and it normally comes down to a log-jam somewhere in the hardware. The obvious culprit is processor speed, but I don’t think this is the case here – I’d be more inclined to look at either the amount of data that can flow from the camera circuitry, or the write speed to the memory chips. If either of those is slow, then there will be a lot of video recording problems.

Early smartphones had the same problems, and as technology improved (and the phones had a guaranteed ‘”this will sell X hundreds of thousands of units",” the price of components came down till they were able to cope with the flow of information. MIDs are still in their early days, but as they develop and mature their markets, the same economy of scale should improve their media capturing quality in the same way.

Sometimes, voice is simpler. Certainly when you’re in a mobile scenario, getting some audio recorded can be extremely efficient if you’re in a position to be able to do it. Most smartphones give you the ability to record audio but in my experience, you get poor quality, a fixed mic and no way to post-process. If you want to broadcast live, there are very few ways to do it. Using a MID or ultra mobile PC gives you the option to work in a higher quality and more flexible way.

I did some tests with an Intel Atom based Wibrain device recently and wanted to talk in a bit more detail about how I did some quick audio podcasts and broadcasts while staying mobile but still keeping the quality high and remaining efficient.

The key to being efficient in this case was being able to use processes, knowledge, hardware and software that I use in a normal desktop environment and to use a posting process that automates as much as possible.

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