Smartphone Apps - What's on yours?
Due to Windows Mobile Device Centre Center sucking so hard it can pull a very large watermelon through a very small straw at one hundred paces, I had cause to do a hard reset on my current phone. Yes I am still annoyed about that. But no I'm not going to rant. Let's try to get something positive going from this.
So as I was sitting there re-setting up my phone, installing applications, marvelling at WMDC actually connecting for once, I decided to put this article together to discuss the applications I find essential on my smartphone, and ask anyone reading the age old question: "What's on your Smartphone?"
SPB Software Triple Play
Probably the three most important applications on my phone come from one supplier. I'm a recent but very keen convert to SPB Software's Mobile Shell.
This amazing product has quite literally revolutionised the way I use my phone. Usually, a 'locked' Windows Mobile will show nothing but the password screen. A find piece of work to be sure, but hardly very useful. Mobile Shell starts its tour de force of phone improvements by replacing this screen with the 'now' screen, a quick summary of all the important stuff your device might want to tell you, at a glance.
Battery and signal level are represented, a quick view of the weather forecast, current time, outstanding messages and your next diary appointment are all available on the now screen, saving you the time required to unlock your device to check something trivial.
But wait, there's MUCH more. When you unlock your windows mobile, you get taken to the Today screen. As Aximsite's Mobile Shell review mentions, very little has changed here since, well, since as long as I've been using Windows CE/SmartPhone/Mobile devices.
One of the things I find to be a tremendous pain in the hoop on a mobile device is needless scrolling. This is especially galling on a screen that is supposed to be summarising the state of the device, because this is precisely where it is most important that all the info you need is available at a glance, and this is one of the areas where Windows Mobile can fall down very badly; by the time your vendor has added their custom branding and own 'preferred' shortcuts for things to the today screen, there is often little space left for anything else, leaving you just one or two software installs away from a today screen that looks a mess and can't all be viewed at once.
Mobile Shell integrates into the today screen and does a damn good job of keeping things tidy by moving much of the information normally carried on the screen into tabs at the top of the screen. This has the obvious advantage of tidying up the today screen, and the perhaps slightly less obvious advantage that wherever possible, Mobile Shell uses icons that are large enough to be operated with your finger-tip, handy if you just quickly want to peek at something.
These tabs are customisable, too. As you can see from the screen shots, I'm using four tabs here, one for shortcuts, one for time/alarms, one for weather and one for quick links to 'favourite' contacts. I could put just about anything that can run on the today screen into a tab (some things are obviously more appropriate than others, and some things work better than others), and I can have more or less tabs if I wish.
Click on the samples above to see my other tabs. And click here to see more screenshots from Mobile Shell in the photo gallery I've put together to build this article from. There's lots of good stuff captured in those photos but left out of this article for the sake of brevity.
Another product from SPB that I've added to my phone is SPB Weather. This improves on the basic weather plugin that ships with Mobile Shell, adding support for multiple locations and multiple feeds from various weather sources, so you can get UK weather feeds from the BBC Weather Centre, US feeds from Weather.com, and so-on.
There's probably not much more to say about this plugin. It says what it does, it does what it says, it's either very useful or totally useless to you depending on your weather forecast needs, and one minor point of criticism, it is an utter pain in the hoop to add cities from a custom feed, should you need to do so (though to be fair, as this is an open-ended product that lets anyone write their own feed source definitions, it's difficult to see what else they could have done I suppose).
The next product I grabbed from SPB is actually a bit of fun after all this serious weather forecasting and shortcutting (yeah I made that last word up. So what?). SPB Brain Evolution is a brain training app but still a lot of fun with it. I don't have any screenshots and I'm not going to say much else about it, so you'll just have to take my word on that. Or go and grab it and give it a go yourself. I'm not counting this as part of the SPB essentials as it's only a game, but then all work and no play...
Last product from SPB and probably the most important and boring product on my phone is SPB Backup. Backups are the thing that everyone knows we ought to do, but all too often just forget about. Well SPB Backup makes it about as simple as can be to backup and restore your Windows Mobile device, with manual backups, a scheduler, and a very simple interface to work it all from.
Again, probably not much else you can say about this product. It does what it claims to do, and does it very well. As you can see from the screenshot of the scheduler there, I have my phone set up to do 2 backups a week in the evenings if / when my phone is in its cradle, so that the backups don't drain the battery. The backup files it creates can (and probably should) be saved to memory card, and are generated as simple .exe files which you should be able to just run in order to return your phone to working order in the event of a mishap. Moving these files off the device onto your computer in the event that the mishap involves you actually losing your phone and the memory card remains your responsibility however.
Next on my list is WinRAR. That's right, you can actually grab a copy of WinRAR for Windows Mobile. Not bad eh? Again, not much else to say about this. It's the sort of application you either love to use or have never even heard of.
Wireless Festival
Moving on swiftly then, we come to another product that you'll probably either have already or not care about one jot, and that's WiFiFoFum, a Wireless scanner for Mobile devices. Not a lot to say about this really, again, it does what it claims to do, and it does it very well. It requires Microsoft's .net compact framework, which you can grab from MSDN and is probably an essential download in its own right for most Windows Mobile users. Remember kids, stealing WiFi is wrong, so only use this tool for surveying your own wireless network.
The author of WiFiFoFum also produces a number of other interesting items, which you probably ought to look at. I've tried them all at one time or another and while they don't often stay installed for very long due to the way I use my phone, these are all very good and well worth a look-see. Dynamo, especially, is well cool, and WiFiTunes would be essential to me if it worked with iTunes 7, and if I didn't have the next product I'm going to mention.
Salling Clicker is a 'big deal' Mac app that has been around for ages, that allows you to remote control your Mac (or Windows machine these days) via a PDA. And it's great. Perhaps less important for leisure use with a Mac now that the Apple Remote is everywhere, but still a damn useful bit of software. You can control just about anything on the parent computer via your PDA with Salling Clicker and a bluetooth or WiFi connection, making it a great companion for anyone delivering presentations with a laptop, but who prefers to talk to their audience rather than stand behind a computer mumbling into the screen.
Again, click here to see more screenshots of Salling clicker in action in the article gallery.
And Finally.
Last but by no means least, I want to briefly mention two more items of software. First of all, making it possible to Sync a Windows Mobile device with a Mac is Mark/Space's Missing Sync for Windows Mobile, and lastly, responsible for all the screenshots in this article and the gallery is Magic SS from Lou Terrailloune Software.
If you've read this far I'm sure you'll agree that all thanks must go to the author of this last bit of software for breaking up what would otherwise be an awfully long block of text.