SPB Mobile Shell
This may just be the best improvement you can make to your PPC. It adds an optional screen that appears when you activate your device. It shows the time, weather, upcoming appointments, and waiting emails, texts, and voicemails, as well as battery and signal strength.
The best part about the Mobile Shell, though, is the SPB menu. When you activate it, it provides EASY one-handed activation of functions and applications, something sorely lacking from the standard Windows Mobile. The picture really doesn't show the screen to screen navigation that makes it so intuitive and easy to use.
The standard Windows Contacts screen can be replaced by the SPB Contacts screen. This screen adds a numeric pad to the screen, allowing you to punch a few buttons to bring up your desired contact. This is particularly helpful for PPCs with slide-out keyboards. Without this, you have to either scroll through your entire list of contacts, or open the slideout keyboard.
The last great main feature it adds is a tabbed plug-in for the today screen. My favorite tab is the photo dialer, but it also adds a smart launcher, time and alarms tab, and weather. Other SPB software can also be integrated into these tabs.
SPB Backup
What can I say? This is the gold standard backup software for the PPC. I use it. It works perfectly. I do wish that there was some sort of script that automatically offloaded backup files from your storage card to your PC, but besides that, this program has everything you need to back up and restore your PPC.
SPB Phone Suite
This is the batch of little things that your phone has been missing. You may or may not have known it, but it is.
Probably the biggest addition are the Phone Profiles. This allows you to not only configure several different notification profiles with different volumes, vibration, blinks, etc., it allows you to set them based on time, appointments on your calendar, if you're in the car, etc. For example, you can set the phone to automatically switch to the Meeting profile when your calendar has an appointment. You can also manually select a profile and then tell it how long to keep that profile before switching back to normal. This is especially helpful if you are forgetful about taking your phone off vibrate.
There's also a great Today Screen plug-in that, optionally, can be integrated into Mobile Shell. It adds a picture dialer (a richer version than the one included with Mobile Shell), message counts, a button that makes it easier to turn your radios on and off (bluetooth, phone, wi-fi, etc.), and a profiles button.
When you recieve phone calls, you can configure Phone Suite to ask you if you want to reply with a text message. This is handy for when you are in a meeting and someone calls, you can simply blast an SMS message back to them letting them know you recieved their call, but will have to call them back.
There's also a nice Photo call log. It adds photos to the standard call log, making it easier to scan through and find the call you are looking for.
Another great feature is the call filtering. You can set it to accept all calls, reject all calls, reject only callers on a blacklist, or accept only callers on a whitelist. Very handy for people that might want some peace from their phone, but still want a select few callers to be able to reach them. It occurs to me that someone with an annoying ex might find use for the blacklist, too...
No comments:
Post a Comment