SPB Software has just released the latest edition of Pocket Plus. We were provided a prerelease version for evaluation - this review is based on the release candidate version!
The PocketPC platform has often been ridiculed for enormous lags and delays. When these reports are examined closely, it usually comes down to users installing a plethora of small and tiny ’system enhancements’ that eat up CPU power and memory. SPB Pocket Plus is a collection of system enhancements - can it stack up?
Like most other applications of this type, SPB Pocket Plus is controlled from the system settings:
Here are a few of the gadgets I consider especially noteworthy:
Battery state indicator
The line visible on the top of all the screenshots in this review is the ‘battery indicator’. It allows you to keep an eye on your PocketPC’s energy supply at all times.
Close icon power-up
Tapping on the close icon for a long time pops up the following menu:
Additionally, the program allows you to ‘really close’ applications via their x button…this means that they won’t continue to run in the background.
Common Dialog update
The open/close file dialogs of the Windows Mobile operating system have classically been limited to just the My Documents folder. Pocket Plus breaks this barrier, allowing every application to save its data wherever it wants to:
File explorer update
A small menu is added to the PocketPC’s file explorer, allowing you to zip and encrypt files. While this could be helpful for some, I prefer a dedicated file manager like Resco’s.
Safe mode
Safe mode allows you to disable a variety of programs normally run at startup in order to diagnose bugs.
Tabs for Pocket Internet Explorer
Pocket Plus can enhance Pocket IE to support multiple tabs open simultaneously:
Today plug-in
Last but not least, what would a PPC toolkit be without a today screen plugin - images of their launcheresque tool below:
This review looked at a prerelease version of Pocket Plus 4 on a hp ipaq rx4240. The program needs 3MB of memory and has been pretty stable in the testing period.
Cutting a long story short, SPB Pocket Plus is a nice package of potentially useful, well-programmed gadgets. Some will find them incredibly useful, others will detest them. So, why not download the free trial software and play around a bit…if you see yourself using the gadgets often, purchase the app for approx. 30$ in the TamsShop(owners of v3 pay just 15$ via SPB customer care)!