RockPlayer Universal
Platform: Android

Read all of my past Android app reviews at Appolicious and Yahoo! Tech -- click here.

RATING:
5 out of 5

PRICE:
FREE

TASTY:
Take your favorite videos files with you on-the-go for smooth playback on your Android device.

BUMMER:
Works on 2.1 or higher OS versions. The better the CPU of your phone, the smoother the frame rate. Copying files from your computer to your DROID can be a chore.

COOL:
Finally, a solid excuse to start filling up that integrated 16G’s of storage most DROID owners received for free with their new device.

REVIEW:
Movie lovers, rejoice! RockPlayer Universal from Redirect Intelligence is a killer app, making it easy to play back your entire library of video files (including DIVX, AVI, XVID, MKV, RMVB, MP4, MPG, and many more) right from the memory card of your DROID.

Finally, a solid excuse to start filling up that integrated 16G’s of storage most DROID owners received for free when signing up with their local carriers in the United States. That said, copying files could take some serious time, even over USB 2.0. But let’s face it, that’s a minor price to pay for ad-sponsored playback of our video libraries.

Once you’ve moved a movie or two onto your phone, fire up the app to browse the file structure of your device. Just click on a file to begin playback. My original DROID (A855 or D1) played back every file I could throw at it, though clicking the left-most control to shrink the image size by 20% or so greatly cleaned up the frame rate.

The audio is crisp, the controls are basic and perfectly matched to the application, and the display even thoughtfully shows you both the current time and your battery level, so there’s no need to leave playback to check the clock or be sure you’re phone battery isn’t tanking.

The app offers dual mode playback: Normal mode using LGPLed FFmpeg parts to support various formats, and System mode using hardware capabilities for better battery performance.

The app can be used free with visible advertisement, or you may pay $9.99 to support the developers and get you free updates for life along with future enhanced capabilities (none yet.)

This is a must-have app for all serious movie buffs who need to take videos files with them on the road. If I could give this app 100 stars, I would!