Tuesday, May 11, 2004
One for the Plus Column - Pocket Plus 2.0 by Spb Software House
Posted by Doug Raeburn in "SOFTWARE" @ 10:00 AM
Don’t Be Alarmed
For a product that’s supposed to be able to keep track of your appointments and make sure you get to them on time, the Pocket PC provides some pretty weak alarm functionality. If you don’t or can’t react to the alarm in some way (like tapping the snooze button), it basically goes off once and that’s about it.
Figure 20: This screen speaks volumes.
Pocket Plus adds a great assortment of new capabilities to Pocket PC alarms. Figure 20 shows one of the settings screens for the repeating alarms. The ascending sound volume is the real winner here, in my opinion. If you’re in a quiet area, you should hear the alarm while it’s still at a low volume and shut it off before it annoys others. If you’re in a noisier area, the alarm will eventually get loud enough so that you should hear it. No set volume can provide that versatility.
Figure 21: More options.
Figure 22: No power trip for the repeating alarms…
Figures 21 and 22 show more of the repeating alarm settings. You can set the alarm to play continuously or in a set of repeating series, and you can configure the number of times the alarm will sound in each series. You can also tell it how long to continue to play the alarm. And finally, so that repeating alarms don’t wear your battery completely down, you can set them to stop when the battery gets below a certain charge level.
This functionality can be very helpful. Unfortunately, SPB warns you that the repeating alarms may not work with all Windows Mobile 2003 devices and, lo and behold, my upgraded iPAQ 5450 is one of them. However, it does work fine on my iPAQ 2215. According to SPB, this is due to an issue on the OS side. At any rate, as always, it behooves you to take advantage of free trials to uncover any problems or incompatibilities. It's worth noting that the repeating alarm functionality is turned off by default, so when you first install Pocket Plus 2.0 it will not interact with the alarms in any way until you turn this feature on.
