Windows Phone Thoughts: Mitac Mio Digiwalker 168 Review

Additional Applications
Most Pocket PCs ship with a few unique applications in addition to the standard Windows Mobile suite (Task, Calendar, Pocket Word, etc.) and the Mio contains a few applications from Mitac beyond the mapping software.

eMenu


Figure 24: eMenu software.

eMenu allows you to set up groups of shortcuts to applications on the device. These groups are displayed as tabbed pages and each can have a specific background image associated with it. Above the tab groups is a special area for system shortcuts. The shortcuts that appear in this area are limited to items specified in a check list and include Inbox, Calendar, Task, Battery, Memory, Time, and Region. Oddly enough only the last two items can be unchecked, as the others are permanently displayed.

E-Viewer


Figure 25: E-Viewer software.

E-Viewer is a picture viewer/manager application. It is a little more feature rich than the standard Pictures application and makes it easy to move files around via its File Manager-like interface. Still, it is a bit sluggish after opening a couple of images, and I had trouble viewing several larger files that Pictures and the iPAQ Image Viewer have no trouble with. If you deal with a lot of imaging then you will probably want to replace this app with something a bit more feature-rich and robust.

MP3Player


Figure 26: MP3Player software, showing equilizer.

The Mio 168 comes with a built-in MP3 player in addition to the Windows Media player. This MP3 player features a graphic equalizer (with several presets) and includes buttons to disable the screen, set looping options, and a skinnable appearance. Beyond that it doesn't seem to have many features to set it apart from Media Player.

Mio Utility
The Mio Utility applet resides in the Settings menu and provides some basic information and control on the Mio 168. The device's ROM version, OS version, and unique device ID are given on the first tabbed page, while a second page allows control over the device's battery. Here users can balance their needs for performance versus battery life. The third tabbed page allows the user to configure what events will return the device from suspend mode as well as allowing the SD slot to power down during suspend mode.