RealOne Player

Simpler MP3 player from Real

by Shawn Barnett

Posted May 23, 2003

Though it came out a little late, the RealOne player for Palm OS is now available for download. While not as nice and feature-rich as the AeroPlayer, it does have the advantage of simplicity and low price. It's free. That's a low price, but it's not entirely free. To install it you have to install the RealOne Player on your desktop. Anyone who's ever installed this application knows its rife with popup ads and even ads that appear in the player window. No such ads appear on the Palm device, thankfully, so I recommend that you install the whole deal, and check out what RealAudio has to offer by way of video subscription service, etc. Indeed to watch CNN (AOL) videos you have to subscribe to RealOne SuperPass. But you don't need any of this to play MP3's so if you're not interested, just uninstall the PC player and copy your songs over via an SD card reader (place them in a file in the root directory named "Audio"). Real would make their Palm OS player, and thus their service, quite a bit more compelling if they expanded it to play the video and other forms of audio available from themselves and Time Warner AOL. Someone needs to compete with Microsoft's Sync & Go, and no one else is poised to do so but Real.

-Shawn Barnett

www.realone.com

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