Windows Media Player has long been considered one of the weakest parts of the Windows Mobile feature set, possibly because Microsoft has traditionally seen the platform as an enterprise solution. This is now changing and I think that possibly, with WM6.1, the ugly duckling may have transformed - if not into a swan, then at least into something that you'd be happy to serve roasted to your guests.
On the face of it little has changed, not a bad thing as WMP was always a good looking solution, although not on the same scale as the iPod app on the iPhone. The mechanics of the player seem to work much better though - syncing with the desktop player finally seems to work reliably and album art, playcounts and playlists all transfer as expected. The only remaining anomaly - that the shuffle and repeat options don't work properly also seem to have gone away.
On this basis, can WMP serve as your only MP3 player, rendering that iPod, or add-on software redundant? I think it can - as long as your needs are the ability to listen to music either in playlists or randomly, with easy track control and support for A2DP and AVRCP Bluetooth profiles. And scrobbling.
Yes its possible to scrobble your tracks live with the entirely unofficial Pocket Scrobbler. This sits in the background and sends details of what you've listened too through to the last.fm servers either instantly or at the users request.
Its not as clean a solution as Pocket Tunes, nor as pretty as Pocket Player, but it is entirely free and it works very well. When the radio portion of the application (inexplicably disabled in this version) is restored this will be the ultimate scrobbling setup.
Pocket Scrobbler can be found here:
http://www.last.fm/group/Pocket+Scrobbler
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