Proud Geek

For a long while, I thought I couldn’t watch YouTube and other streaming videos on my Palm Treo 650. I told all my friends this, and co-workers as well. And one co-worker, who also had a Palm Treo (although she had a 680) but was rather a neophyle, actually told me about a program that makes it possible to view streaming videos on my Treo: Kimono.

Kinomo can play all sorts of media, and whether it is stored on your Treo or streaming in from the Internet over the air. It can play several different music types, and you can view several different video and picture formats as well. More specifically, Kimono can display these media formats:

• MP3
• Windows Media 9
• Flash Video (e.g., YouTube)
• MPEG-4
• RTSP
• AAC / iTunes
• JPEG photos

According to Kinomo, that means you can watch “entertaining internet video and live web cams, and [listen] to informative radio stations and podcasts.”

It costs a cool $24.95. But I only had to use it once (to watch my daughter’s campaign video straight from the web) to get all excited about it and to buy it. It comes with a list of “channels” of live news and weather television shows and various other television stations as well.

While streaming video works on my Treo 650, it’s really slow, and “live TV” skips quite a bit. I think that on other Treo models with higher speeds (i.e., using the EDGE network with near-broadband speed), it would work a lot better. And a downside: I found it very difficult to find and copy links to Flash videos (e.g., YouTube videos) into Kinomo. Maybe I’m missing something, but it should be easier than having to find the link using my laptop computer and emailing it to my Treo …