Spb Pocket Plus V3 Review

By: Hilal Mikati

July 21, 2005

Spb pocket plus is a well known application which introduces many enhancements to the windows mobile platform. With the emerging of the new WM2005, Spb Software House developed the new version of Spb pocket plus (version 3.0.0) which is compatible with this new platform. I have been testing this application for a couple of days and here is my review with as much screen shots as possible to make it clear and useful. 

For the installation it is as easy as most of the other applications. Just run the executable file on the PC and follow the on screen instructions. The first new thing one notices in this version of Spb pocket plus is that it can be installed either on storage or RAM. Personally I prefer installing it on RAM in order to get fast response time. The size of the program easily permits it to be installed on the device’s RAM without taking much space.

After installation, the first thing one sees is the appearance of the new Today screen plug-In. In the first tab which is Main you can see the battery and the memory icons in addition to some icons for standard programs like word mobile and excel mobile and calculator. The next tab is Connect which contains 5 icons which are: Internet Explorer, Messages, ActiveSync, Beam and Connections. The last tab is System which contains many icons such as: Screen toggle, Theme loop, Remove programs etc…. The order of the tabs can be changed just by dragging and moving the required tab. One can increase the number of tabs according to his preference. By tapping and holding close to the icons you get a small menu in which you can add or remove icons.

For customizing the settings according to your own taste, you have to go to system settings where you can find Spb Pocket Plus icon. Pressing on it takes you to the features page.

Before starting with the features description, notice the Tools button at the end of the screen. Pressing it provokes a menu with the About and registration options, and 3 other options which are: Backup Settings, Restore Settings, and Advanced Settings. Backup Settings, as its name suggests, allows the user to make a backup file for the Spb pocket plus settings that he already customized. He can choose the name of the file and the location. Now in case of hard reset, he can simply restore these settings from the Restore Settings option. In advanced settings menu we can choose to enable repeating alarms and storage card indicators.

Starting with the features description we find that the first feature is Close Button. If you press on feature options you get a list with check marks. What you are looking at now is the list of features that you want to appear in the context menu. There is a wide range of features to choose from. If we move to the next tab which is “Button” we see 3 menus. These menus determine the action performed when one taps, taps and holds, or gestures the X on the upper right corner. The last tab is “Exceptions”. In this tab you can determine the programs which you want them to be minimized normally when the X is pressed.

The next feature is Repeating Alarms. Pressing on feature options takes you into a page in which you can choose which alarm signal you want to be played when the alarm goes off. You can choose wether you want the sound to repeat or not by checking or unchecking the box. Below this you find 3 options which determine how you want the alarm to sound: Normal, Maximum and Ascending. Before moving to the next tab we notice that there is a tools button which when pressed pops up an “advanced settings” menu. It contains some options which you can tweak according to your needs. The next tab is Settings. In there you can choose which preference you like best and you find the good feature which is Stop when battery gets to a percentage which you determine so that the battery is not drained completely.

The feature which follows is Pocket Internet Explorer. This feature contains some useful options which are concerned with the way Internet Explorer should behave. One of the best things that Spb pocket plus introduces into Internet Explorer is the ability to open multiple windows. This option must have been implemented by Microsoft itself. We can also find full screen support.

The Today Plug-In feature takes you into a page in which you can add, delete and organize your tabs and add items to each tab. After the tabs page there is the appearance page in which you can choose how you like the theme to be applied. Margins and tab pages have some options for the appearance on the Today screen.

The next feature is one of the most important features in my opinion. The taskbar battery indicator which smartly allows the user to know his battery condition in any application since it shows all the time in the upper part of the screen as shown in the picture below (except in full screen applications like games or movies). The only option in this tab is to choose whether you want the indicator to be small or large.

Next is the File explorer feature. This feature implements several very useful functions, which should have been there by default. All of these functions do exactly what there names say. I am going to comment on the enable add to today screen function which lets you add a shortcut on the today screen for any folder you like by simply tapping and holding on the desired folder and choosing the add to today screen option.

Buttons feature has 2 options. Edit commands lets you choose what actions you want to be available so that you can map them to a hardware button. The assign to button option lets you choose which action to assign to the respective hardware button that you desire. The most important and useful thing that I liked is the ability to assign an action which is similar to the alt+tab action that we use on our computers. Now if you have two or more applications running you can simply press the button which you assigned this action to it. After you press it a task manager appears in the middle of your screen showing you the different icons of the running applications. You can navigate from one to the other using your left and right pad buttons to switch between them.

The last feature that we are going to discuss is the safe mode feature. It has two options which you can choose from: the “on every reset” option and “if system worked less than one minute” option. This is a new and handy function that may become very useful to you. It may rescue you from going into a hard reset procedure. If for example one of the applications which have a today screen plug-In messes up in one way or another and you want to remove it, it can’t be removed since it is already running on the Today screen. So the only solution will be to hard reset. Now using this “Safe mode” function, you can simply boot your pocket pc in safe mode which disables all Today screen plug-Ins and autorun applications and services, thus enabling you to easily remove the desired application. After that you can go back to normal mode.

At the end, all I can say is that this application is a must to any user who wants to fully benefit from his pocket pc. It adds many important features to the system which should have been integrated by Microsoft originally when developing the operating system.