Review: Pinnacle Mobile Media Organizer utility software

Pinnacle’s Mobile Media Organizer is intended to help you collate all the various tunes, movie clips and photos you have on your computer and transfer them to a portable media device.

It looks and works a bit like iTunes except that it has extended movie and photo functions and can be used with the Sony PlayStation Portable, iPods and unspecified “other portable media players”.

When you first start it up, Pinnacle Mobile Media Organizer will ask you if you’d like to search your system for media. Set it to scour your entire hard disk(s) and it’ll present a neatly organised library, with separate tabs for Music, Movies and Photos.

Where music is concerned, there’s not a great deal here that iTunes doesn’t already do for free. Mobile Media Organizer can be used to create playlists, rip music from/burn music to CDs and sort your media by artist, genre or title – but then so can most free media player software.

Indeed, since there’s no built-in music store or even any support for rights-managed songs bought and downloaded from iTunes, Mobile Media Organizer’s music features are actually slightly less useful for iPod owners than Apple’s free media player.

When it comes to movies and photos, however, Mobile Media Organizer starts to come into its own. The program can, for example, take a wide range of different video formats (including AVI, DivX, MPEG, WMV and VOB) and either convert them for use with your portable player or burn them to a DVD.

The photo organiser alone is a pretty useful tool for sorting your library of digital snaps and transferring them to your handheld. Once again, however, there are applications available that do both of these things for free (or cheaper, at least).

It’s true that Mobile Media Organizer offers some features beyond iTunes, but there isn’t really enough here to warrant £35 of any iPod owner’s hard-earned cash.

PSP owners have no dedicated media player/converter/transfer utility at their disposal, so Pinnacle’s program makes more sense for them.

Poddies who need the movie format conversion tools could consider Pinnacle’s standalone Mobile Media Converter, which costs £15 less.

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