The remarkable change in the Pocket PC world in the last year hasn't been
the hardware -- basically, we've just seen some bells and whistles get
added onto platforms announced in early 2000 -- but rather the explosion
in software.
When I started this series (http://www.thenakedpc.com/articles/v04/14/0414-02.html),
I quoted Ashley Walker of Handango, a leading vendor
of products for handhelds, "When Handango launched into the Pocket
PC software realm, we had approximately 30 pieces of software and now
we have over 800, that is a 2500% increase in a little over a year. The
Pocket PC platform has demonstrated an average monthly growth rate of
over 20% for Pocket PC software sales..."
And, believe me, I have been seeing that growth. This piece has been delayed
for weeks because I was waiting for "one more" new release.
On top of that, has just unveiled its new Pocket PC 2002 operating system.
So, herewith a caveat: this is my survey of the Pocket PC software scene
as of the week prior to publication. There are no warranties, implied
or expressed. Your mileage may vary.
*The Must-Haves*
-- Peacemaker Pro by Conduits Technologies,
Inc., $14.95.
One of the key features of handhelds is transferring files from one unit
to another via infrared "beaming." Then Conduits developed Peacemaker.
You can beam to a Palm from your Pocket PC and also receive data back.
Files, notes, contacts, calendar items, all neatly reconfigured to the
demands of the respective units. For example, because Pocket Outlook contacts
have more fields than Palm Address book listings, Peacemaker automatically
trims the Outlook data to fit into the Palm.
Microsoft is adding enhanced beaming to Pocket PC 2002. However, users
of handhelds with PPC2002 still will benefit from Peacemaker because it
allows multiple data items to be transferred in a single operation. Jason
Patterson of Conduit notes that "about 75% of existing Peacemaker
customers bought it to beam over all of the entries from their old Palm
devices" and the company plans to enhance that capability further.
So now if you have a Pocket PC you can share an intimate beaming moment
with your Palm counterparts.
-- HandyZIP from CNetX, $19.95. The product is exactly
what it sounds like: it will create or open compressed archive files in
the standard zip format. This allows you to move a .zip archive over to
your Pocket PC as is, and open it on the handheld as needed. Compressing
files in a zip is particularly valuable for conserving space on your handheld's
precious built-in RAM. The interface is easy to use ... very much the
Pocket PC equivalent of WinZip ... and zip files will be associated with
the program in by Pocket PC's File Explorer.
-- Flash Format 2.0, $14.95, also from CNetX, allows you to check and
format and all ATA compliant storage cards, including PCMCIA memory cards,
Compact Flash Cards, Multimedia Cards, and MicroDrives. It will provide
detailed storage and file statistics (including FAT Type, slack space,
heads, cylinders, sectors, clusters, etc.), verify card integrity, and
detect and repair allocation errors.
A key feature is its ability to format cards in FAT32 (default in Pocket
PC is FAT 16), with its smaller cluster size. Since Pocket PCs inherently
deal in small-sized files, slack space can mount up -- especially, as
a CNetX spokesman reminded me, given the availability of large-capacity
storage cards and disk drives (http://www.thenakedpc.com/backissues/v4i16.html).
Flash Format also can create a backup FAT and create an Auto Run capability
to provide that a specific file will run when you insert a particular
card (e.g. start up a graphics viewer on a card that has picture files).
-- Code City's City Time,
$14.95.
OK, "must" is a stretch." However, I like it. I first came
across the application when it was bundled into Handspring Visors. It
tracks time in four cities besides your own, gives sunrises and sunsets,
moon phases, travel distances, computes time differentials, and generally
makes life easier for people whose work and friendships cross time zones
and international datelines.
One of the key features of City Time is that its interface has a world
map with areas of daytime and night marked. Tap on a location, and the
time for that place pops up. It was an interesting feature in black and
white, and looks exceptionally cool in color. City Time's strength is
that it brings information to you in a way that takes advantage of the
handheld platform.
-- Clearly,
Pocket PC 2002
is a must, too, as it has a wide range of enhancements ranging from the
purely cosmetic (its interface looks like Windows XP's) to the long overdue
(you can now search contacts by company and there now are spell-checkers)
to major overhauls: Pocket Outlook has been substantially redone, html
mail now is supported, Word and Excel are enhanced, security features
have been tightened, and Internet connectivity improved. It continues
to move along the path of serving as a handheld stand-in for a PC.
Of course, while it is a must-have, you can't have it. You will either
have to wait for new units with the new OS to make their way to the market
or for your Pocket PC manufacturer to offer a ROM upgrade that installs
Pocket PC 2002.
*Pocket Office Additions*
Unlike the version of Pocket Office that ships on larger Windows CE devices,
the one on Pocket PCs does not include Pocket Access or Pocket PowerPoint,
so third-party vendors have leaped into the breech. These are brave souls
since at any moment, Microsoft could take their market away from them.
However, at least through the new Pocket PC 2002, they are OK.
-- abcDB Database from Pocketsoft, $19.89,
is the easy winner of the Access surrogate award. Fully relational, abcDB
is a heavy duty database, with support for forms, queries, and SQL query
language. It even uses Active Sync's Access conduit to sync files with
your desktop. In other words, if you like Access, you will like abcDB,
and it is the easiest way to port Access data to your Pocket PC.
Another option to consider is HanDBase, $25, from DDH Software, Inc. It
is a flat file type database that is simple to set up and use. It syncs
via its own desktop application, which can then import or export in .csv,
Excel, Word, and html formats. But the really big deal is that HanDBase
is a Palm OS application that now supports Pocket PC. As a result, it
offers database users cross-platform compatibility plus the libraries
of pre-fab databases available in the Palm world.
-- Competition in the PowerPoint presentation category has been brutal,
as a series of new software releases during the course of this review kept
the outcome in doubt. But in the end, Pocket Slides from Conduits
Technologies, $39.95, emerged as the
top choice. Dragging a PowerPoint presentations on your desktop to the
handheld via Active Sync or Windows Explorer triggers a conversion applet
that will set the image sizes and options for the conversion to Pocket
Slides format. Transition effects from your presentation are preserved
on the handheld, or other effects can be added. Presentation slides can
be modified on the handheld, new presentations created, you can use your
PDA stylus to mark up your slides during a presentation (such as drawing
a circle around a key point), and Pocket Slides is capable of working
with presentation video cards for the Compaq iPAQ.
I initially thought the idea of PDA presentation software to be more of
a "isn't this cool?" toy for showing off. But a presentation
slides, if you think about it, is basically high-visibility, high-emphasis
text and graphics -- something that is intended to leap off a screen,
including one on a Pocket PC. Accordingly, a presentation on the handheld
is relatively effective as a presentation, and you can use the technology
to create, in essence, electronic 3x5 cards for you to use as quick reference
tools. Moreover, with presentation graphic cards available for the iPAQ
(and additional products likely to be coming along), the Pocket PC allows
you to give a presentation without having to manipulate a laptop.
Being the first kid on your block was no advantage here. The first entries
into the market were quickly outdistanced by new products that incorporated
the features of their predecessors and added a new batch of capabilities.
And there are other worthy contenders. CNetX's Pocket SlideShow, $19.95,
for example, was nearly my choice after the company released v.1.1, which
added support for iPAQ graphic cards to a package that includes the best
interface in the category and transition effects. It lacks Conduit Pocket
Slides' ability to edit and create slides and its the full range of transitions.
However, it is attractively priced and loads files faster.
Presenter,
Inc.'s iPresentation Mobile Converter has only
minimal features, but it is free and is a way for users to see if the
Pocket PC presentation category works for them.
*Additional Software Tools*
-- The Applian Super Incredible
Bundle, $49.85,
is a good buy for Pocket PC users, as the price gets you its PicturePerfect
5.1 graphics software and CoolCalc enhanced calculator, which are $19.95
each by themselves. The bundle adds in a reminder, "Virtual Wallet"
(it stores drivers license, credit card, or bank account numbers and like
personal information with password protection), a dialer program that
uses the PDA's speaker to generate dialing tones, a file encryption program,
and a few games.
CoolCalc provides a wide range of advanced calculator functions -- financial,
scientific, loans, currency converter, tip calculator, metric converter,
date and time calculators. A nice convenience.
Picture Perfect allows you to sensibly organize photos on your Pocket
PC. You build collections of images as slide shows to display on the handheld.
The software allows you to set transition effects, timings between slides,
"smart" full-screen views (automatically adjusting for portrait
or landscape orientation), sound effects, and text notes. It also performs
lossless JPEG transformations, such as rotation or flipping, on an image.
Conduit's Pocket Album, $19.95, has a feature set similar to Picture Perfect.
It also has the addition of the ability to resize photos to fit the handheld
screen (to save file space), but at the penalty of longer load times.
-- Another Conduit product worth a mention is Timekeeper, $9.95, a nicely
designed stopwatch program with "skins" to optimize it for purposes
ranging from timing a race to cooking an egg.
-- Pocket PCs ship with a handheld applet for -- surprise! -- Microsoft
Money. Pocket Quicken exists only in the Palm universe. However, Keep
Track from Ilium Software is a well-featured
application to, ahem, keep track of your trips to the ATM, credit card
purchases, and the like. It will import and export to the .qif format,
which both Quicken and Money use for data exchange. The interface makes
use of programmable buttons for common transactions and for inputting
numbers, to achieve the all-important goal of minimizing the number of
stylus strokes you must make. It's $19.95, plus $10 for the Desktop Keep
Track module to synchronize, print and back up your transactions.
-- Primer from Ansyr Technology, $79.95, is a heavy
duty Adobe Acrobat .pdf file reader for the Pocket PC. And I do mean .pdf
reader -- it opens and displays actual Acrobat files in their original
form, as opposed to the number of programs on the Palm platform that convert
the .pdf into a simplified format. This is not for the casual user looking
to skim product brochures. Primer is intended for business users who want
to make key documents -- instruction manuals, handbooks, organizational
guides, and the like -- on Pocket PCs. Company spokespeople say they see
training and reference documents as a key market, as this will allow workers
to check through key materials in the field.
-- And let's not forget to have a little fun:
Microsoft Entertainment PocketPak, brings the
mission critical applications of Freecell, Blackjack, Chess, Cinco, Hearts,
Minesweeper, Reversi, Sink The Ships, Space Defense, and Taipei to the
Pocket PC. The bundle is $29.95, or buy individual games for $9.95 each.
***
SIDEBAR: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Productivity on the Palm
Meanwhile, let's not forget the thousands of Palm users looking for
enhanced ways to exchange data with their desktop applications.
DataViz has released
Documents to Go Professional 4.0,
$60, a major enhancement to its popular application for transferring
Microsoft Office documents to the Palm. In addition to support for Word
and Excel (plus an add-on for Adobe Acrobat files), v.4 adds PowerPoint
presentations to the mix. It will transfer the text from the slides by
default, and you can also sync small or large graphical versions of the
slides. Another add-on allows you to read email attachments in the
supported formats.
Basic formatting in Office, such as text sizes, italics and boldface, and
so forth, carry over to the Palm.
Originally only a reader, Documents to Go's "Professional" series added
the ability to edit the files on your handheld and sync them with your
desktop so you can update your documents while on the run. The program is
a must have for Palm users.
Cutting Edge Software's Quickoffice, 39.95,
consists of the Quickword word processor and Quicksheet spreadsheet
application, the later bundled with the self-explanatory Quickchart.
The programs have formatting capabilities that will carry over to your PC
when synced. Macros on your desktop for Word and Excel allows you to sync
from inside those programs as well as from a Quickoffice desktop module. A
free Quickdata add-on lets you integrate your data with HanDBase (see
above), and a Quickoffice MultiMail Plug-in lets you Send and receive
Quickoffice e-mail attachments via Palm's popular email app.
One important point: Quickoffice and Documents to Go are not competing
clones. DataViz's product is ideally suited for users who will be creating
their documents on the desktop and want to take them along on their Palms.
Cutting Edge's software, on the other hand, is a better choice for users
who plan on creating content on their Palm.
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