ApoTheTech

I just heard from Access, makers of the Netfront browser for Windows Mobile, that a new concept version is now available for their browser.  Netfront was the most full-function browser for a long time on the Windows Mobile platform but we saw a very long period of inactivity until recently.  The new version of Netfront has the following features:

• Speed improvements
• Better navigation
• Animated zoom
• Page map
• Column rendering

This pre-release version carries the following restrictions:

• The trial period for this software expires on August 31, 2008
• Plug-ins are not supported
• No technical support is available for this concept version
• If NetFront Browser is installed on external storage, the application’s behavior becomes unstable when the device is turned on or off
• Integrated Windows Authentication for IIS is not supported

You can find more information (including a video) and download the trial at the Netfront web site.

The XDA range of O2 have been successful till now. The XDA range has always been powerful and full-featured. Then, what does the Atom Life has to offer to make itself stand in the very competitive PDA-phone market? What makes Atom Life so special and different from other windows mobile devices? Lets find out.

Review of O2 Atom Life by MWG

O2 Atom Life is made by quanta. The last HTC device which was branded by O2 was HTC universal. After that, O2(asia) teamed up with quanta and released Atom followed by Atom Exec. Atom Life is the latest quanta device from O2(asia). Both Atom and atom exec have been very popularAtom was, infact, the first windows mobile device to offer FM radio built-in. Its successor Atom Exec used 192MB ROM. Atom Life offers 1GB ROM and runs the fastest processor avaliable for windows mobile devices! Very few devices running windows mobile offer this much amount of memory and speed.

Design of O2 Atom Life

The device is very compact. I’ve fairly large hands and device feels comfortable to hold in my hands. Width wise, it is same as Atom. Height-wise, just 4mm bigger than Atom.

It is quite light at 145g. I’ve come to Atom Life from O2 Executive(don’t confuse it with Atom Exec), which was quite large for a phone device. The built quality is excellent. The body does not make any sort of sounds upon squeezing, which is a good sign for quality.

Sadly, like Atom, the body is glossy(again) and therefore, a fingerprint magnet. So, make sure you have some sort of cotton/nylon cloth handy ;)

Power button and mini SD slot are on the top of unit. At the bottom of the unit, you’ll find the usual 2.5mm headphone jack, mini-USB, microphone and reset button.

On the right side, you’ll find two application buttons(both remappable). On the left side, you’ll find two buttons to adjust the volume. Note that latter cannot be remmaped. Also, there is no jog dial.

On the back you’ll find the 2.0M camera. The quality of camera was acceptable

On the front, you’ll find a VGA camera for video calls, a little grill which encapsulates the speakerphone and LED lights for notifications(reception, wifi, bluetooth and alarms). The display is 2.7″ TFT QVGA LCD display, which supports 262K colours (but, only 65,536 effective due to OS limitations). As you move down, you’ll find two soft-keys(finally O2 has listened to the complaints of atom/atom exec users which didn’t have any soft keys), D-pad, call/end keys and Windows application key and media key, which opens O2 Media Plus(but, it can be remmaped). I recommed users to remmap it to ‘Ok’ action as it would improve one hand useability of the device

Comparison with other devices(and things)

O2 neo(htc prophet) and atom life

ipaq 2215 and atom life

my wallet, atom life and my watch

Its all about power, speed and memory

Atom Life is equipped with state-of-art Intel PXA270 processor running at 624MHz, which the fastest avaliable for any mobile phone. Its performance was great and was able to run everything with ease and great speed.

To add to the icing, it has 1GB ROM! Finally, I can store every program I want to install in main memory. This is a big advantage when compared to launching applications from storage card as it speeds up loading time. Also, you no longer need to worry about your storage card going nuts and thus driving you nuts! Please note that not full 1GB is avaliable to the user. (as some space is used by OS and O2 specific applications)

The RAM is 64MB out of which we get ~23MB after fresh hard reset. O2 should have made it 128MB like HTC Tytn II, but, 64MB ram looks fine to me for running every sort of application that comes to my mind. Sure, there are some games that require 28-30mb of free RAM. I don’t think so that you can achieve that in Atom Life :(

Software

When the Atom Life was launched, it came with windows mobile 5. Soon after few months, O2 endowed Atom Life owners with newer, sleeker and ‘better’ windows mobile 6(for free). The new units with windows mobile 6 are already into the market.

Continuing the tradition of including O2 specific applications, Atom Life too came with these applications

• O2 Connect
• O2 MediaPlus
• O2 Menu
• O2 SMS Plus
• O2 Themes

The story does not ends there, O2 further bundled following applications which can opitonally be installed by user anytime.

• CodeWallet® Pro
• GPRS Monitor
• Jeyo Mobile Extender 2.0
• Jeyo SMS Backup
• Jblend(for running java applications)
• PDF Viewer
• Self Diagnostics
• Sudoku Revolution
• WorldMate

Connectivity options

Atom Life supports all sort of modern connectivity that today stream of high end devices offer. Atom Life has it all. It is a Tri-band(900/1800/1900) UMTS, HSDPA device which also has wifi and bluetooth.

It also has FM radio.

Camera

On the paper, Atom Life’s 2MP camera sounds good. But, in real life, it is just enough good for taking pictures in times when you’re not carrying a camera. Its nice but picture quality is adequate for blogging. Here is a picture of a girl I took this afternoon(actual resolution of the picture was 640 x 480)

The camera offers 8x zoom at 176 x 144, 4x at 320 x 240, 2x zoom at 640 x 480 resolution. In other resolutions, that is, 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200, zoom is not possible. The strobe light is pretty much useless too. Don’t expect it to match the flash of Nokia N95.

Pros:

*WM6
*Fast
*Lots of storage memory
*UMTS and HSDPA support
*non-telescopic stylus
*FM radio
*nice set of bundled applications

Cons:

*body is a fingerprint magnet
*no GPS
*Camera quality still leaves lot to be desired
*Speaker sound still shabby

Final thoughts about the O2 Atom Life

Atom Life is a great device with lots of features and connectivity built in. The storage space is mammoth. The device looks sexy and very elegant too. Screen is great to look at. Not to forget the fastest processor in its class it posseses!

“SPB Mobile shell brings forward a new, exciting, user-friendly and easy-to-use way to interact with the device. The windows mobile device never felt so easy to use. All the core functions and applications can be launched without taking your stylus out!”
Continue reading “SPB Mobile shell v2”

Managing and interacting with the files have always been a difficult task on a mobile device. Microsoft does include a file manager with each windows mobile device, then, why do we need another file manager? Well, the answer is simple, the default file manager is slow; lacks a lot of features when comepared to its desktop brother. That is why, many software houses have come up with thier own file manager
to fill the weakness. Continue reading “PocketFileManager”

Many a times, it happens that we loose our data due to reasons like hard resets due to flat battery (in pre-WM5 devices) or a need for forced hard resets arises due to some faulty installations or registry changes. In such cases, data is lost and every single thing needs to be installed again. Having a backup becomes more important since Microsoft Activesync 4.x doesn’t supports backup. But, this problem can be totally solved with the help of SPB Backup. Continue reading “SPB backup 1.0”

“Dinarsoft HandySwitcher 3 is the perfect way to manage you running-applications. With the small memory footprint, user-friendly interface and plethora of features, it is simple-yet-powerful application.” Continue reading “Dinarsoft Handyswitcher 3 Review”

Keeping the Pocket PC healthy and clutter-free just got easy. ‘Memmaid’, as the name suggests, is the perfect maid for your pocket pc to manage memory of your Pocket PC

Memmaid is truely a maid for your Pocket PC. Memmaid not only helps you to keep your Pocket PC clean and tidy, but, also helps you to tweak it so that it performs well.

Memmaid is an extremely feature-rich application. As you can see the screenshot shown below, its interface is very user-friendly.

Continue reading “Dinarsoft Memmaid 1.73 review”

SBSH Pocket Breeze is one of the best selling application for Pocket PC devices. It is one of applications for Pocket PCs, which I consider as a must-have. This is generally the first application which I install on any new device or a fully hard-resetted Pocket PC. So, what is Pocket Breeze? It is a PIM (short for Personal Information Management) today-plugin, which displays your PIM data right on the today screen itself. The latest version of it at the time of review is version 5.2, which we are using at the moment on our devices.

Introduction

Take a look at the below given screenshot(with today theme supplied by Pocket Breeze). All of your PIM data is at the today screen sitting nicely. SBSH Pocket Breeze is an extremely feature-rich application and is highly configurable. Lets take a quick glance at the “Options”. As you can see, everything is self-explanatory. Lets dig into every feature.

General tweaks and settings

This contains the general settings of the Pocket Breeze (example: height, font face, D-pad support etc). You can select it paint vertical tabs(default) or horizontal tabs(just untick “paint vertical tabs”).

Left-handed users rejoice as there is a left handed mode in Pocket Breeze, which basically makes the scroll bars to appear on the left side of the plugin. As you can see, the Pocket Breeze comes with plethora of options to customize it. Fortunately, it comes pre-configured nicely so that a new user does not face any problems at all

Skinning support: Pocket Breeze supports skinning too. Just keep the skin somewhere on the device and point the Pocket Breeze to assign it. I m using the VistaBetaTWO skin for Pocket Breeze.

Calender

With the introduction of Windows Mobile 5, Microsoft stressed upon “one-handed usability”. Developers at Pocket Breeze realized this need. The Pocket Breeze is fully controllable by one-hand easily. So, I can now open a task and set its priority to high etc. You can sort your calender items by category. If you click on the calender button, a small calender window will pop up. In this window, you can do a number of tasks. You can change the display order(options>>calender>>Advanced tab). You can tell the Pocket Breeze to show number of unread mail messages. You can pin a calender too on your today screen now. Want to change the layout of the icons and items? Change them here.

Tasks

Got hordes of work to do, but do not know how to remember all of them? You need not worry any more. Just leave the task to Pocket Breeze to manage all your tasks. It displays your past, present and future tasks. When you look into the options of this feature, the first tab ‘general’ tab. with this option, you can select the date format you wish to have while displaying the tasks. Also, you can set the maximum time period till which you want the tasks to be displayed. Also, there are many options with which you can very well manage your future or overdue tasks, dated or undated tasks, etc.

From the ‘grouping titles’ tab, you can set the line breakers, folding options and task counters. From the ‘layout’ tab, you can customize the looks, icons and colours of the ‘tasks’ tab. Now comes the ‘advanced’ tab, which lets you set the date formats.

Notes

If you have important notes, you would definitely like to keep them right on your today screen. And, Pocket Breeze lets you do that rightly. The thing you notice in its options is the ‘general’ tab. This option lets you customize the preview of the notes on your today screen. From the ‘grouping titles’ option, as with special events and messaging, you can set the line breaker, folding options and grouping counters.

Contacts tab

Through this tab, you can easily lookup names, search them, edit them and even dial and email them. Cool! Contacts can be grouped on the basis of category and company. They can be displayed in either ascending or descending order. The search function of Pocket Breeze is very functional and useful. Just start tapping on the small tabs of the search panel and the required contact and Pocket Breeze will find the contact for you

There are 3 modes of displaying contacts inside the Pocket Breeze, namely, Standard, Names only and Pictures Expanded. First two modes are obvious. In Pictures Expanded mode, you can see the small thumbnail-sized pictures adjacent to the contacts.

Messaging

This is one of the best features provided by Pocket Breeze. Now, you wont ever miss out on any important message, be it any mails or sms. The reason being, you will have all of them right on the today screen of your device. Now coming to customising the messaging tab. The first thing you will notice is the ‘general’ tab. This provides you with the option whether you want to mark your message as read, after previewing it.

The next tab is that of ‘grouping titles’. This is same as the ‘grouping titles’ option of the special events tab.

Special Events

This tab displays all the special occasions and events you want to keep track of. The best feature of this option is that if you enter some birthday or anniversary against any contact,pocket breeze automatically detects it and displays it in the ‘special events’ tab. You can also customize it the way you want. You can configure pocket breeze to look for desired number of time period to keep an eye on your special occasions. You can choose from 7 days, 30 days or one year. Also, you can select the number of days to alert, select the date format and also determine the file format.

Tapping on ‘appointment data’ tab, presents you with various options to customize the way your appointments look. You can select from various options like the number of days span you wish to load, number of days set to alert and also set the options for various categories of filters.

The next tab in the special events settings is that of ‘grouping titles’. This option lets you customize the line breaker and the folding options. You can also choose to include or exclude folding buttons and grouping counters.

Pros:

*Supports a lot of languages
*support of viewing contacts
*lots of customization
*stable & reliable
*can incorporate other today plugins
*clubs up with Pocket Informant & Agenda Fusion
*skinnable
*Great online support/community
*Windows Mobile 6 fully supported

Cons: None

Final thoughts: Pocket Breeze is one of the best selling today plugins. This is one today plugin, which I would recommend as a must-have for any Pocket PC user.