Mobiedge Radio is a podcatcher (podcasting client) that runs on an S60 mobile phone. You can use it to download, read, manage your subscribed podcasting feeds on your phone. Because of the large size of audio files, a traditional podcatcher will be a high capacity MP3 players (e.g. iPod) or a desktop media player.
To solve the audio file size problem, Mobiedge Radio comes with a desktop helper application called "Mobiedge Radio Bridge". You can use Mobiedge Radio Bridge to download huge audio files via your PC Internet connection and convert them into AMR format. AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) is an industrial standard of audio encoding which is broadly used in today's telephone products. An audio file can be encoded into AMR format with much smaller size while keeping fairly good audio quality. For example, a 5.9Mb CBC Radio podcasting file "www_cbc_ca_quirks_media_2005-2006_mp3_qq-2005-11-05a_mp3.mp3" (64kbps mono MP3, 12 minutes and 53 seconds) can be converted into a 491Kb file in AMR, i.e. the size is reduced by more than 10 times. By using AMR converter we can make it viable for a mobile phone to support podcast which used to require more than 100Mb of memory space.
The Mobiedge Radio works in 2 modes:
Online mode
the reader downloads subscribed feeds and/or enclosed media files from web sites via wireless data services, e.g. GPRS, so that end users can get the latest content anytime, anywhere
Offline mode
the reader downloads content via PC Internet connections with the help of a PC application named "Mobiedge Radio Bridge" (see the following image). The PC application also converts enclosed audio files into AMR format. Using this method end users can get bulky contents (say, more than 1MB) without paying for the wireless data service, thereby save the total cost
Features of the game include:
- Download contents anytime, anywhere (using a wireless data service)
- Download contents via a PC Internet connection
- Manage your subscriptions with folders on both mobile phone and PC
- OPML file import/export
- Convert podcast files (MP3) into AMR format to save lots of memory
Listen to podcasts on your Series 60 cellphone.
