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[Slacker]

Battery Pack Pro
By Omega One Solutions
MGN Rating -

Rating Legend

1 star: Find something else; save your money
2 star: Below average; not recommended
3 star: Average; performs as advertised but not inspiring
4 star: Good; worth the money
5 star: Great; best of its kind on the market

Review by Slacker
Review Date / March 10th, 2006

Note: Screen captures are created with Pocket Controller-Professional by Soti, Inc.

One of the first things I look for when I get a new device are utilities and applications that will allow me to best manage that device. Just a week ago I was able to pick up the new T-Mobile MDA, a Pocket PC phone running Windows Mobile 5. For the last 2+ years I have been using a Windows Mobile SmartPhone device almost exclusively so making the leap back to a Pocket PC device as my primary device has been a pretty big change. Sometimes change is good, right? In this case it means a whole new world of software and accessories to be tested and played with!

As I said, one of the first things I go for is a utility to help me manage the device. With Windows Mobile devices, and PDA's in general, battery life and memory are always critical to stay on top of. There are several vendors out there with utilities to watch battery life, or manage running tasks, keep up with memory usage, etc. But what you really want is one application that can do a lot of things at once, which reduces the storage and memory required to install and run the application. That saves you some of those critical resources to allow you to do more with your device. And it is with that goal in mind that Omega One has produced Battery Pack Pro. What is Battery Pack Pro? This is what Omega One has to say about it:

The Only Pocket PC Utility You Will Ever Need!

Battery Bar
Displays Battery, Memory, Storage Card, Network connection, Time, World Time & backlight data on the today screen.
Tap on each section for detailed information.
Speaks to you when your battery, memory or storage cards are low, or battery is fully charged.
Battery life is shown in hours an minutes. This customizes itself to how you use your Pocket PC over time.

Program Bar
Create up to 160 shortcuts to your favorite Pocket PC programs right on your Today screen.
Auto scroll to pack the maximum number of icons into the minimum space.
Tap and hold on an item to find full information about it.

Power Time
World time view. See where it's daylight, or check when your friends / customers are awake or at work.
Automatically grabs the latest exchange rates & current weather conditions for each city. With Journal Bar installed, displays the current 5 day forecast for each city.
Get detailed information about each city.
With 1-Calc installed, tap on the exchange rate to launch 1-Calc to quickly convert currency.

Power Task
Close button actually closes programs.
Speed up your Pocket PC by closing slowly running programs taking up lots of memory. Keep your Pocket PC running as fast as the day you bought it!

Power Bars
Displays the battery, memory & storage card life on the title bar - see your Pocket PCs vital statistics all the time.

Power Clean
Reclaim valuable space by removing unwanted files automatically.

Power Buttons
Launch 2 programs from each button on your Pocket PC. Tap to launch one, and tap & hold to launch the second one.
Open settings applets, documents, or perform "special" functions like soft reset the device.

Power Alert
Adjust Calendar, Task & Alarm sounds to repeat, change volume & more. Keep reminders quiet during meetings; have unique sounds so you know what the alert is!

Power Store
Provides even more detailed battery, memory and storage card information.
Keep a track on your battery, memory & network usage with graphs which show your usage over the past 24 hour period.

Power Adjust
Customize your Pocket PC with lots of cool tricks, including different system fonts & animated windows.

Power Light
Don't fumble with the keys in the dark - turn your Pocket PC screen into a flashlight, or a warning light for emergencies!

That is a lot of stuff! But what exactly is all of that stuff and what does it do? Let's take a look. When you install Battery Pack Pro it automatically loads itself onto your home screen. You get two new sections, Battery Bar and Program Bar. We will look at the Battery Bar first.

This is a shot of the homescreen with Battery Bar and Program Bar showing. Battery Bar is the second bar and is circled here:

Lets take a look at the features behind each icon. The first icon in the upper left is the configuration icon for Battery Bar. When you click it you get the full Battery Bar application and configuration interface. Through that interface you can view battery life, memory usage, storage card usage and Networking information. T his is also where you access the configuration screens for the program. This application does a lot more than tell you when your battery is low! It even gives you a snapshot of the last 24 hours!

The icons at the bottom are different sections. The screens above are from the Power Store section. This is the Power Time screen and shows you time and weather for the cities you have set up. If you have Omega One's Journal Bar set up it will give you a 5 day weather forcast for those cities instead of just today's weather.

As I mentioned earlier, resources on a PDA are limited. One of the cool features of Battery Bar is the ability to delete temporary files and do so automatically. You can set it and forget it, and let Battery Bar handle that task for you.

A limiting and often discussed feature of most Windows Mobile devices are alerts. Whether you are talking about alarms or reminders there usually is only one option, for a short alarm. Battery Pack Pro offers the option to repeat alarms, change the volume and set different sounds for each type of alarm. This is really extending the capabilities of the operating systems notification system.

You can also control some of the behaviors of the operating system. For example, one of my chief complaints is that there is no easy way to truly close an application on a Windows Mobile device. When you click the X it really doesn't close the application. You can quickly run out of memory by opening several applications and clicking the X to "close" them, but in reality have all of them still running in the background. Not a very efficient use of memory. Battery Pack Pro gives you the option to change the default behavior of the X on all applications. Why that isn't a capability built in to Windows Mobile is beyond me, but Battery Pack Pro takes care of it.

The next feature is a safety feature. Battery Pack Pro can act as a flashlight, turning the screen white to provide light, or can give you a flashing red screen to use as a warning. Personally I don't see myself putting my MDA 100 yards behind my car when I break down, but I am sure there are other reasons you may want to use a signal like that.

One of the things I appreciate is when developers put a help system on the device and not send me back to their website to learn how to use a product. What happens when I need to know how to do something and I don't have a computer with internet access? Well Omega One is very good about that, and Battery Pack Pro is no exception. It includes a sufficient help system right on your device.

Battery Bar also includes a feature to recalculate battery life if you swap your primary battery. click the refresh button on the bar and answer the pop-up:

In addition to the settings information, you can access other panels from the main Battery Bar by clicking on the icons. for example, clicking the MEMORY icon takes you to the system memory screen, and clicking the NETWORK icon takes you to the system network screen.

That pretty much covers Battery Bar. But wait, there's more! Battery Pack Pro now includes Program Bar, an application management utility to go even further down the road to making your Windows Mobile Device easy to use and manage. The top bar, circled below, is Program Bar:

So what is Program Bar? In a nutshell it is a shortcut bar that allows you to set up shortcuts for up to 160 applications. Click a shortcut and the application starts. If you can't remember what the icon is for, click and hold the icon and a pop-up tells you what it is.

Finally the last piece to this application is the task manager capability. Remember, your resources are critical on a Windows Mobile device, and they must be managed. Windows Mobile devices do not support the ALT TAB option to swap between running applications, so switching around from solitare to Pocket Word is cumbersome. Battery Pack Pro's task manager makes it simple. Just click the small down arrow below the X or OK button and you can see a list of applications running. Click one and that application comes back up. Click the X and that application is closed.

Also from here you can close all applications, all but the active application, and power off the device.

Battery Pack Pro also can also control your program buttons (the hard buttons on the device) to let you open two applications with each button. There is a new icon added to the SETTINGS on your device to set up a click application and a click and hold application.

So that sums up the capabilities of Battery Pack Pro, a very useful and capable application. It offers many features that Microsoft should have included in the operating system but didn't. Features that help you better manage the precious resources on your Windows Mobile Device. But is Battery Pack Pro worth the $29.99 price tag? That depends on what you expect to use it for. It does offer a lot of features, but I expect some people would not use all of the capabilities it has to offer. There are other task managers out there, for example, that do not offer the auto clean, flashlight, program bar and other Battery Bar Pro features. If all you are looking for is a task manager application you should probably look elsewhere. But if you are looking for a tool with the most capability in the same application you should consider Battery Pack Pro. And bundled with other Omega One applications you can save some money and get additional capabilities all at the same time!

You can download a trial or buy Battery Pack Pro from Handango