Windows Phone Thoughts: All Tapped Out? DinarSoft's HandyMenu v2.5 Reviewed

Introduction
Start – Settings – System – Memory. Four taps to get from the Start screen to the Memory settings on a Pocket PC. While the Pocket PC makes it very convenient and quick to do many things, getting at your settings is not one of them. DinarSoft has come up with an approach for quick access to Settings and other commonly used functions, and they’ve implemented their solution in a utility product that they call HandyMenu. Let’s put the latest version (2.5) through its paces.

Using HandyMenu


Figure 1: The HandyMenu icon is next to the bell.

After an easy “by the book” installation procedure, you have a new icon in your system tray. This is how you access HandyMenu. The standard icon is an on/off button, but you can replace it with another icon of your choice if you so desire.


Figure 2: Now you know why they call it HandyMenu…

Tap on the icon, and HandyMenu is displayed. The choices displayed on the menu in Figure 2 are the defaults upon installation, but you can customize the menu in a number of ways, which I’ll cover later in this review.

To go back to the example at the beginning of this review, you can use HandyMenu to access your Memory settings with 2 taps, instead of the standard 4 taps. Cutting the number of steps involved in a common and simple task such as this is, as Martha Stewart used to say, a good thing. Similar “tap savings” can be achieved if you adjust your brightness settings or change your Today theme frequently.

Soft Reset can be a useful command as well. If your favorite case doesn’t happen to provide access to the reset button, you can perform a soft reset right from HandyMenu instead of removing your Pocket PC from its case. My case does provide access to the reset button, but my favorite 3rd party stylus is too large to push the button, so I have to unscrew the top of the stylus to get at a special tip that can push the button. Or I can skip all that and just use HandyMenu. The more I use this product, the more appropriate its name seems to be.

And HandyMenu has even more convenience features. You can designate one function supported by HandyMenu as your “quick action”, which you can access via tap-and-hold on the HandyMenu icon. The default quick action is Power Off, but you can select from any of the functions that HandyMenu provides. Both HandyMenu and the quick action can be assigned to hardware buttons.