Once music is on your handheld, you can create custom playlists, or just choose a particular album or artist and play the songs that go along with it. I found the menus easy to navigate and clear, and while I started out creating playlists for each album, it's so quick to just go through the "open" menu and find songs that I stopped. It's worth doing if you have songs by a variety of artists and want to quickly select the same group over and over.

Sound quality
The sound quality is surprisingly good. My Treo came with a single-earpiece headset, and I've also bought an adapter to allow me to use standard headphones. Playing without headphones, it's quite obvious the Treo's playing out of a single speaker, but the quality is more than good enough for background music. My car doesn't have an MP3 jack, so I often use my Treo in the car, letting it play without headphones. The volume and sound quality are good enough that I don't need to have the Treo at full volume. In fact, I find it too loud at full volume.

Pocket Tunes offers a volume boost feature, but I found it caused distortion at all levels, and I didn't need it anyhow. If I'm using a two-ear headset, I usually have the volume somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five percent; with the one-ear headset, or a louder external environment, I'll go up to seventy percent or so.

Full volume is too loud to talk over when playing without headphones and I'm sure it wouldn't do my hearing any favors with headphones. The Treo is sitting beside me as I write this, speaker side up, with the volume at forty-one percent, and it's a perfect level for background music.

Managing phone calls
When you make a call, or a call comes in, Pocket Tunes pauses its playback until the call is complete. As well, Pocket Tunes recognizes when I'm recording a new voice memo and stops playing until the memo is recorded, starting again when I'm finished. I have been using this software now for several months and have never had it play at the wrong time, or start playing again after I've stopped it.

Pocket Tunes has a background play feature, so you can use other applications while the music plays (something explicitly not allowed in the iPhone, for those keeping track). I find the playback only skips when moving from one application to another when I open a particularly large eBook, and even then only for a split second. Pocket Tunes even continues to play during a HotSync operation, with an occasional small stutter, and plays behind an alarm sound as well.

You have the option to have a small console pop up when you press a button to allow you to control Pocket Tunes from other applications. Figure B shows this console over top of Documents to Go and the novel I'm working on at the moment. Being able to quickly skip or repeat a song without leaving the current application is handy.

FIGURE B


It's easy to control Pocket Tunes from other applications via the console. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Internet radio
Pocket Tunes version 4 allows access to Internet radio stations. Hundreds of stations are available by default, but you can also add your favorites. In my tests it seemed to take about five to ten seconds for a station to begin playing, but once it started I found the playback to be reasonably solid. There were occasional pauses to rebuffer, and playback was also disrupted when I also attempted to access my Gmail account through the Web browser. Reading eBooks or accessing other applications didn't affect the playback.