Star Wars on the (really) small screen

I found another reason to dig my Pocket PC. My usual top reasons are talking books from audible.com and reading electronic books (in really big fonts!) with the Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC.

But having picked up a 1Gb SD card for next to nothing, I thought I'd investigate the supposedly forthcoming phenomenon of pocket movies. Microsoft has been making some noise about their new portable devices that play movies, but you don't need one of those. You just need a copy of this software and you're done. In about the time it takes to watch the film, it's converted to a 250Mb AVI at 320x240 resolution. That's 15 frames per second at a resolution that's higher than your TV, so it's pretty darn watchable. There is a slight weirdness to the screen when rotated to watch in landscape mode, probably because the RGB subpixels on the LCD or up/down aligned in this mode, but you get used to it.

So having recently picked up the Star Wars box set to relive my childhood like all the other 30-something males on the planet, but not having time to scratch myself like all the other 30-something males on the planet, I can now squeeze this necessary pastime into my morning commute and leave all the iPod weenies wondering why exactly they think they're so cool. Rock on.