Over the last couple of years, manufacturers and networks have been putting more and more pressure on consumers to use their phones for more than just calls and SMS. Perhaps a natural result of this drive is that phone manufacturers have also been producing proprietary applications for viewing and manipulating multimedia files received or created on your phone.

Multimedia Player is the snappily titled offering from mobile phone top-dog, Nokia. Billed as a “powerful application” for viewing, playing and managing content sent to your phone or from a phone to your computer, Nokia Multimedia Player sets out to be a one-stop-shop for all your mobile multimedia needs. Unfortunately, it’s a badly designed and poorly executed product which has never really been up to the standard of mainstream audio and video players.

After installing Multimedia Player (and suffering the inexplicable Windows restart which always accompanies a Nokia program installation), we were disappointed with an ugly, glitchy and clunky program interface. Nokia have created custom window decorations for the program, and sadly they’re of a very low standard. Compared with other media players (iTunes, RealPlayer and even Windows Media Player), Nokia’s design is remarkably poor. Its ugly, ‘jaggy’ elements are a real let down from the company responsible for designing some classic mobile phones.

When it comes to functions, there are some basics for media players which a software developer has to get right. Fast-forward scanning while watching a video file is one feature which most users would demand from a video player. Nokia Multimedia Player does include this feature but it doesn’t work on videos created with Nokia phones, surely the key media which the player would be aimed at. Interestingly, Apple’s iTunes supports these videos and allows the user to scan through a video while it’s playing.

The quality of video and audio playback in Nokia Multimedia Player is also disappointing. Comparing the playback of several video files with other media players, we noticed significant degradation in the quality of the video as well as a flat, dull sound quality. Some file formats we tested the program with wouldn’t even open, despite Multimedia Player claiming that they were supported. The only format we found which Nokia Multimedia Player supports better than other programs is the MMS multimedia message format used between to send pictures and short videos between phones or from a phone to a computer. This feature is particularly useful if you’ve received lots of MMS messages and want to archive them on your computer.

To be fair to Nokia, this program is two years old now and at best, it's a very basic application for viewing multimedia messages you’ve received on your phone or computer. For the most part, however, it’s an ugly, ungainly and dysfunctional waste of disk space. Instead of this program, why not use Apple iTunes which is capable of handling practically all of the formats which Multimedia player claims to support.