Well many of you might have played with Nokia Play To [beta] in your Symbian^3 devices which was released on very first day of the month “June 2011” by Nokia Beta Labs.
What is Nokia Play To?
Some of you, who doesn’t have an idea about this, might be thinking what this Play To actually is. A very brief introduction to Play To application is that it supports media streaming from your Symbian^3 smartphone onto external devices e.g. your home audio system, a big screen TV, or your PC. For more extent, it means that you can share photos, audio content, or even videos to a supported external device. These external devices are said to be DLNA client media players while the phone in this scenario is said to be Streaming server.
The requirement is only a WiFi network with which these devices will be interconnected. The streaming is performed via DLNA over UPnP Audio/Video (AV). The external devices must have support of DLNA. Hence it’s called a streaming between DLNA supported server and DLNA supported clients.
Is this technology new?
Quick answer is that “Not at all”. But yes it’s new to Symbian^3. In fact before Nokia Play To application, S60 devices used to have a built-in feature of streaming media over to other DLNA supported clients. For instance Nokia E52, Nokia N82 etc. There are a few others as well.
Thanks to @mobileyog and @nilayshah80 for feeding about these specific devices.
These S60 devices were having an application named “Home Media” out of the box. It does the same as the Media Server (installed with Nokia Play To) to share media from the device to external supported client devices. But on the top of that “Home Media” in S60 devices could also perform as a client player (DLNA client). Which means you can stream media from other devices having streaming server. For example those S60 devices can play media shared from Nokia N8. Unlike that new Media Server in Symbian^3 (or N8) can only stream or share to other supported devices but can not play media that is streamed or shared from other devices.
Simply to say that Home Media in early S60 devices has both the server and the client, while Play To currently comes with only Media Server.
Explanation enough now see both below in action
Checkout the following screen shots from a Nokia E52. The screenshots of Nokia Play To are after the break.
Once media shared from Nokia N8, In Nokia E52 “Home Media” is showing N8 in servers list, browsing it and then opening a selected image file from Nokia N8. The following image preview was on E52. The same way audio and video can be played by the client if the format of the content is supported on the client.
Nokia Play To with its simple and cooler interface can be seen below.
However Nokia Play To for Symbian^3 devices is still in Beta Labs, so we hope this will also be having features of DLNA client in up coming updates. But we don’t guarantee it.
Watch the video demonstration of Nokia Play To on Nokia C7 sharing media onto a TV.
Where to get Nokia Play To or Home Media
- To download “Nokia Play To” for your Symbian^3 device, head over to Nokia Beta Labs and download.
- Home Media is not officially available as a separate app but is bundled with supported S60 devices. You need to check in your S60 device’s Applications folder to find “Home Media” icon. Not all S60 devices are supported.
