Technology Brings the Benefits of Mobile Entertainment to Everyone

In a span of 10 years, mobile phones and portable consumer devices have reached a level of sophistication that delivers entertainment value to their users from almost anywhere in the planet. The days of the Sony Walkmans allowing joggers and outdoor backpackers to listen to their favorite music while doing their thing is now replaced by a more versatile digital portable system that can store and play all the music you need for a week’s worth of listening at your fingertips.

We’re talking of the ever popular MP3 music files. Mobile entertainment won’t be complete without mentioning video files in the MPEG4 or AVI file format. Both can be stored and played in just about all the mobile phones on the market. You only need to get them stored in high density memory cards and you can go on your journey with earphones to your ears.

Thanks to Digital and Computing Power

Digital music isn’t new. It’s more than 30 years old starting with the first CD that went into mass production back in 1979. It wasn’t long thereafter that portable CD players became a fad as well as automotive CD players and changers that replaced those cassette players almost overnight. Well, not really overnight, there are still cassette players around with music that for some reason have not been taken into the digital fold.  Even some music on the LP format has not been favored with digital CD transcriptions so that a number of people still use LPs and cassettes.  

But be that as it may, CDs weren’t going to take over complete market control.  The limiting factor was that you can only bring with you a few CDs on the road and the players where mechanical using laser trackers that misfire and skip tracks when you’re on the move. It was just a matter of time when digital technology coupled with immense computing power in a PC, compressed CD content into files that allowed you to store at least 10 times the amount of music in a single CD. With MP3 compression, the world of mobile music listening was never the same again.

That goes to video as well. The computing power and generous RAM storage of the PC can encode and decode video files in seconds that allows you watch movies on your laptop and other suitable mobile gadgets that can read those video files. You only need a flash card of sufficient capacity like 500Mb for a 2-hour film.  

Those Mobile Phones and MP3 Players

No one ever imagined that cellphones introduced in the late 80s will eventually become entertainment gadgets for mobile music listeners and video fans. There have been MP3 players designed specifically for the purpose and it was not until Apple’s iPod products hit the market that mp3 music suddenly became a vogue among vast numbers of young and old listeners.

The fad never really died. It remains to this day nearly 10 years after it first got into markets. There are still portable mp3 players. But just about all other mobile gadgets have the ability to play them. The cellphone is one. As of today, the mobile phone is no longer just a communications tool. It’s also a camera, a videocam, a gaming console, a PDA, a video player and an mp3 player. With newer technologies in the horizon, expect this common feature in mobile devices to get even better, with larger memory to keep these video and music files to last even a month without listening or watching a file more than once. GP