Software – Page 43 – Digital-Lifestyles

Spielberg/EA: 3 Game Development Deal

Spielberg/EA - 3 Game Deal The world of film and video games come ever closer as Electronic Arts (EA) team up with Steven Spielberg to develop three original video games.

This isn’t a simple ET, the video game idea. Spielberg (and his team we suspect) will be sitting down with EA in their LA offices, hammering out completely new titles, directly working on concept, design, story and artistic visualisation.

Terms aren’t divulged, but we hate to think how much The Spielberg will be pocketing for this privilege.

We’re sure the possibility of this has no bearing on the The Spiels’ flattery of EA, “I have been playing EA games for years and have watched them master the interactive format.” it’s true, they do have a seemingly never ending flow of polished titles jumping on to the market.

The mutual-appreciation society didn’t break up there. EA Chairman and CEO Larry Probst, went on, “There is no greater storyteller than Steven Spielberg. In addition to his gift for pleasing movie audiences, he has an innate understanding of games and how to immerse players into a fantastic world of action and characters.”

Spielberg/EA - 3 Game Deal EA has been, how shall we say, “inspired”, heavily by The S before, as anyone who’s ever played the opening scene of the first Medal of Honor, and heard of a film called Saving Private Ryan may have noticed.

In this crazy, lawyer-driven business world, some are wondering if the similarity was the basis for the start of discussions – rather than sue the pants off us, why don’t we do a multi-game deal? No … that would never happen, would it?

We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it until it becomes true – once video games develop depth of personality and back story for its characters, TV and film is in serious trouble. Why would you want to just watch a film, when you can be in it?

King S clearly thinks the possibility of this is drawing closer. Well done to EA for snagging him.

Steven Spielberg image – thanks to Wikipedia
EA

iTunes 6 Tested: Your Next TV Supplier?

Russ takes us those who haven’t got a US credit card through iTunes 6 with the downloading of video and contemplates its impact.

I’m sure by now everyone has heard that the new version of Apple’s iTunes (version 6) permits the U.S. user to download music videos and television shows (the U.K. user gets the music videos, but not the television shows). Apple’s announcement, released yesterday, says:

iTunes 6, the next generation of the world’s most popular music jukebox and online music store, lets fans purchase and download over 2,000 music videos and six short films from Academy Award-winning Pixar Animation Studios for just $1.99 each. Customers can also now purchase and download their favorite television shows from iTunes the day after they air on TV, watch them on their Mac or PC and Auto-Sync them onto the new iPod for viewing anywhere.

So, I tried it today. Here’s a snapshot of my experience and my hastily-drawn conclusions for media and communications policy.

My experience: iTunes 6 Tested: Your TV Supplier? * I downloaded and installed iTunes6. Takes 5-10 minutes. No big deal. iTunes6 has the same basic interface and purchasing/sampling system as previous versions of iTunes.

* I do not own the new video-ipod. Some of the press coverage makes it sound like the video-ipod is required to enjoy the video downloads. It’s not – you can play them on your PC or laptop.

* The product selection is not bad, for the second day of availability. There were episodes from 5 Disney TV shows available (including Lost and Desperate Housewives) and what looks like hundreds if not more music videos. There were also 6 Pixar films available. I think they are short films. By the way, the ‘Apple Music Store’ is now a misnomer.

* I purchased two items for about $4.00 – a music video (All These Things That I’ve Done, by The Killers) and an episode of Disney’s Desperate Housewives (first episode of season 2). I don’t mind paying $1.99 for a music video (something that I will likely play frequently), but it’s a steep price for a television episode that I might never watch again. I suppose it depends on the product selection and whether sports and news ever make their way on to this service.

iPod With Video; New iMac; FrontRow; iTunes 6: Apple Summary * File sizes: Killers video: 20.1 mb; Desperate Housewives episode: 208.6 mb. Both were MPEG-4 video files.

* Both downloads completed in about 2 minutes each. I’m on a high-speed connection, and obviously times will vary depending on what’s under your PC’s hood.

* Both video products were of good—but not great—quality and played in what looks like a Quicktime video window. You can manipulate the screen size, so smaller screen = better quality.

* Unlike the BBC’s interactive media player (IMP), I ‘own’ these videos and may keep them on my PC just like music files for as long as I want. The IMP really seems to serve a different purpose and seems more like a DVR than the Apple product. We’ll see.

Hastily-drawn policy conclusions:* The EC should put off serious consideration of any proposed revision of the Television Without Frontiers Directive for at least one year. The EC should see where the market heads before acting. Really, folks, it’s absurd for an intelligent regulator to be developing ex ante rules that may be seriously missing whatever developments occur in the marketplace. Viviane Reding might want to rethink her linear / non-linear distinction if the marketplace offers nothing much by way of linear services, or offers something that is not easily pigeonholed into a category being created at this time. Ms. Reding’s actions may actually have the Oedipus-effect of encouraging IPTV players to avoid linear products. Madness.

* I attended an IPTV conference earlier this year and the focus was completely on telcos offering IPTV service (in a triple play with internet and telephony) that resembles a cable or satellite offering. Well, Apple’s not a telco and iTunes6 does not resemble a traditional multichannel video offering. Same for Major League Baseball, the other important IPTV offering available at this time. Again, we’ll see what happens.

* Broadband, broadband,broadband. The number one priority for policy-makers should be to get faster, cheaper broadband to more areas of the country. With these types of services and free PC-to-PC VoIP, is there any policy goal more important than broadband if you really have the interests of consumers at heart?

iTunes 6 Tested: Your TV Supplier? * I’m sure there are some underlying copyright / “rip-off Britain” issues at play here. I’m just not smart enough to figure them out. But there is a problem when the popular television shows are not available on iTunes-UK and the same music video is 1.89 GBP or about $3.30 – that’s $1.30 extra for each music video that UK customers must pay.

* Public service broadcasters (PSB) in Europe beware. The ‘quality and universality’ arguments you’ve made over the years to avoid true competition are about to be seriously put to the test.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the Desperate Housewives video had no adverts in it. There appeared to be quick gaps where adverts would normally be placed.

Xara Xtreme Goes Open Source/Cross Platform

Xara Xtreme Goes Cross Platform/Open Source UK-based software developers Xara, have announced an update to their sophisticated vector graphics program Xara X, adding new functions and renaming it Xara Xtreme.

Although not as well known as rival programs Adobe Illustrator CS and Macromedia Freehand, Xara has long been our vector program of choice, offering a simple interface, powerful editing tools, a comparatively tiny download (just 21 meg) and the ability to render pages at scorchio speeds that leaves the competition for dead.

Capable of handling photos, business graphics, drawing and illustration needs, Xara keeps the feature set streamlined and focused, offering unrivalled speed at a bargain price.

Xara Xtreme Goes Cross Platform/Open Source In this latest version, the Xara Picture Editor has been updated and a new Live Effects tool allows Photoshop and Xara plug-in effects to be applied to photos and vector graphics.

The rendering engine has been tweaked for even faster performance, with improved Illustrator compatibility and import/export tools.

CEO Charles Moir is extremely enthusiastic about the product, “It absolutely knocks the stuffing out of Adobe and the new Microsoft product. In terms of ease of use, shear flexibility and performance. Adobe has tried for 10 years to get close to our performance levels and cannot. Microsoft are not going to be able to either. I guarantee it.”

Xara Xtreme Goes Cross Platform/Open Source Linux, Mac and Open Source versions planned

Xara have also announced that they intend to create Xara XTreme for Linux and Mac users in response to customer demand, with an Open Source version in the pipeline.

Xara Xtreme Goes Cross Platform/Open Source Moir table-thumped “We’re going to a place that Microsoft and Adobe cannot go. The Open Source world is the acknowledged largest threat to established giants such as Microsoft. We felt it was necessary for us to shake up the graphics world a bit, and making one of the most powerful, easiest to use graphics applications Open Source should do the trick.”

Xara Xtreme is available for Windows now, at just $79 (~£45~€66).

Xara XTreme

Free Mobiles; Technology Terror?; RIAA Boycott – Teenage Tech News Review

Handy… Literally!
Engadget has a story on how Montclair State University in New Jersey is handing out free phones to it’s students to enable them to easier communicate with each other. The handsets feature software which allows them to receive “channels” of information, which users sign up for. These channels include things like the dinner menu and the location of the university’s shuttle buses, as well as channels students have set up of their own.

I can admit I am actually kind of jealous of this: I would love the ability to be able to do this at school, checking up on when holidays are, what’s on the menu, and what my time-table’s like. Sadly, I think my school would have some difficulty in preventing the chavs from selling them on eBay, which of course is an entirely different issue.

This is the problem with technology like this: Those most likely to adopt it are, by default, young people, who therefore can’t afford it. Give it to them instead then, and a select few will take advantage of that. Technology like this, for now, is only for older people I think. This isn’t to say it isn’t exciting though: I still find socio-technological implementations, usually referred to as MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software), fascinating, as although there isn’t yet much of a market for these sorts of services, there will inevitably be, and when there is, it could well change the way we communicate with each other forever.

SMS Text Message Sounds nasty!
Everyone over here in Europe likes to text, or “txt” for short. I’m not entirely sure how popular the practice is over in the US, but in the UK it’s used mainly by teenagers, although others use it too, because of it’s extremely low cost in comparison to making voice calls.

The New York Times is reporting that apparently, using SPAMming techniques, it should be possible to flood a cities GSM infrastructure by sending as little as 165 text messages a second into the network. This is made possible because text messages use the same communications infrastructure and network that voice calls are made to as well. Imagine what could happen if someone flooded a network, so that no calls could be made, and then at the same time a co-ordinated terrorist attack occurred. People would be unable to call the emergency services, and wide-spread carnage and destruction would occur.

This is particularly scary for me, as I would be at a loss in an emergency without my phone: It’s central to how I find people and communicate with them, and when I really need to get in touch with them, I wouldn’t be able to. This reliance and taking for granted of technology is something that most of my generation are likely guilty of, and when everything does kick off and there’s no electricity, phones or water, I would have severe doubts that a lot of them would be able to cope with it.

It was only really recent events (London bombings) that brought this to my attention, but it has made me realise that reliance on technology could be very turned around and be used against us.

RIAA That lot again
Yes, that’s right, the RIAA are at it again: A short time ago, a case against a mother on her daughter’s behalf of file sharing was dismissed in court. Now, the RIAA are back, but this time, they’re not suing the mother but her 14-year old daughter.

People like the RIAA make me so, so angry: At 14, no-one really knows what they’re doing. So a little girl downloaded some of her favourite songs from the Internet. That little girl was probably a paying customer as well, but her pocket money just wasn’t enough, and she just wanted to hear one more song by her favourite artist, but couldn’t afford it. Her friend said “you can get it for free from here”, and so that’s what the girl did. Next thing she knew, the very company she was a customer of, was sending threatening letters to her, demanding thousands of dollars in compensation.

Is this the right way of treating your customers? I know for sure it is one great way of driving them away. If you are in my position at the moment, of having a good few thousand songs you enjoy, then stop buying music unless it is from your local bands or from an independent label. It might sound an unrealistic expectation, but I have found so many great bands on the Internet and locally at pubs and other music venues, that I am quite confident I will never be giving another penny to those greedy folks over at the RIAA.

You can do something about it though, by going to www.boycott-riaa.com. Every little helps!
That would be my rant for the day, have a nice weekend :-)

Playstation: Emmy Awarded

Playstation Emmy Awarded Sony’s Playstation has been awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Technology and Advanced New Media for pioneering the 3D polygonal-based gaming experience, by the US National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).

Now for those who don’t know, there are a ton of Emmys – and why not. The entertainment industry is not only massive and expanding, but there are a huge number of people involved in the creation process, many of whom would go unnoticed without awards like this by those outside the industry, as so much attention is paid to those who appear on screen. The PlayStation’s award falls under the Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, being presented in Princeton today.

Playstation Emmy Awarded You can imagine that the awarding of this will make steam come out of the ears of those on the Xbox team at Microsoft

“Emerging technologies in digital media play an important role in the way in which people consume in-home entertainment, and gaming in particular has been a consistent source of innovation in recent years,” said Seth Haberman, Chair of Video Gaming and Technology Awards panel for NATAS. “We felt that the advent of PlayStation exemplified a significant shift in the direction of the gaming and are pleased to recognize Sony Computer Entertainment for its contribution.”

Many of those who’ve been playing games on the PS & PS2 will wonder why it’s taken so long for something as significant as the Playstation to come to the attention of this Academy. The PS is, after all, ten years old.

Playstation Emmy Awarded Is it only the cynical that would think that the timing of this award has anything to do with the wider entertainment business (read film) getting more closely involved with creation of film license games? Or even that they’ve finally woken up to the fact that the amount of money spent on video games out-sizes that spent on film.

Our long held view is that both TV and film are in big trouble when games develop to the point where their characters are given ‘back stories’ and the intelligence to apply them to during interaction in game play. Why would you want to watch TV when you could be in it?

A big congrats to all those involved in the creation of the Playstation. Ken Kutaragi must be a very happy man.

SanDisk ‘Gruvi’ TrustedFlash: Content On Memory Carts

SanDisk 'Gruvi' TrustedFlash: Content On Memory Carts SanDisk have unveiled their “fingernail-sized” new TrustedFlash cards, a technology that embeds Digital Rights Management (DRM) and decryption technology into memory cards, and also includes a subscription manager enabling the cards to be used for digital subscription music services.

Speaking at the CTIA Wireless show, SanDisk Chief Executive Eli Harar said, “We think this will be a disruptive technology, but will enable a whole new world of opportunities in the mobile market.”

“Today content is locked to play back on one device. Now we have the freedom to enjoy content on whatever device consumers want to use,” he added.

Harar stated that the TrustedFlash card would act like current SD cards, with the technology able to be extend into on-demand content such as feature films and online games.

Despite their speck-like proportions – a mere 18 mm long and 2g in weight – the cards can offer enough storage space to hold thousands of DRM-protected MP3, films, photographs or games.

The “Gruvi” (what?!) cards use the micro SD card interface so they can be slotted into mobile phones, GPS devices, MP3 players and computers.

Users of the card could, for example, buy a video online, view it on their home PC, save it to the TrustedFlash card and then slap the card into their PDA/smartphone for watching on the move later.

SanDisk are also hoping that content providers like music companies, film suppliers and mapping data companies will ship preloaded Gruvi cards with the content protected against copying by TrustedFlash.

The first batch of cards using TrustedFlash will be preloaded with the Rolling Stones’ new CD “A Bigger Bang,” due for a November release with the 265MB card costing $39.95 (£22, €33) – What?!? How Much?!?

The Stones’ release will also hold four additional albums that can be unlocked for an extra fee.

SanDisk hopes that the new cards – expected in the UK by Christmas – will eventually reduce the costs of buying music.

Pedro Vargas, SanDisk’s director of mobile entertainment, said that the price was justified by the extra capacity and flexibility on offer, and that he expected prices to drop over time.

In the future, the cards could be used to play content from subscription music services such as Yahoo Music and Napster.

Subscribers could download the DRM-protected songs onto the chip and play them back on any suitably equipped MP3 player, with the DRM continually checking the subscription status (so if the subscriber hasn’t kept up with their payments – whoosh! – no more music!)

SanDisk are producing the new cards in capacities ranging from 256MB to 4GB and expect them to debut in October followed by a complete rollout to be completed by March 2006.

SanDisk

Pocket Informant Review: Pocket PC (4/5 Stars)

Pocket PC Pocket Informant 2005 Review Pocket Informant 2005 is an integrated Pocket PC application that replaces the built-in Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, Journal programs and adds a Timeline view.

Loaded with customisation options, the program lets you dabble with just about everything and anything you can see on screen – typefaces, font sizes, font colours, categories, category colours, icons – the lot!

Although this seem a bit like overkill, the different screen sizes and resolutions available on PocketPCs means that controlling font sizing can come in very handy.

So, how does this do-it-all Personal Information Manager (PIM) shape up? Let’s take a closer look.

Calendar

The Calendar view offers a host of different views, displaying one day, seven day or whole month views on one screen, with the Agenda view presenting a user-selectable number of days of appointments in a list format, with the option to filter out ‘free’ days.

New appointments may be added by tapping and holding on a day’s title bar. Double-tapping on an entry opens its detail screen for viewing, editing or adding alarms.

Regularly recurring meetings can be set up as templates to speed up text entry (e.g. “Going to pub.”)

As soon as an event has passed it is displayed in italics, making it easy for the easily confused to see what events are remaining in the current day.

As with all the components in the Pocket Informant suite, a global navigation bar sits at the bottom of the screen, offering instant access to diary views, contacts, notes, to-dos and filter and search options.

Pocket PC Pocket Informant 2005 Review Contacts

The Contacts screen opens up with a tabbed alphabetical row along the time allowing nifty access to contacts.

Inputting new contacts is straightforward enough, with the program auto-filling in frequently-entered text.

A whole host of fields are available to include every possible detail of your new contact, with the option to associate mugshots with contacts, and assign multiple categories.

The search facility is particularly clever, with users able to specify that the program looks for entries that start with the search text or for entries that contain the specified text.

Once a number is located, it can be dialled IR, Bluetooth, DTMF or Serial.

Naturally, there are options galore for listing contacts, including First/Last name, Last/First name, providing a picture list, and grouping by company, department, city, state, country, and category.

Pocket PC Pocket Informant 2005 Review Tasks

As you might have guessed by now, the Tasks interface comes with a shedload of options, with entries being sorted/grouped by category, importance, priority, progress, completion, or date.

There’s the usual filtering and grouping options available, with users able to set up nested hierarchical tasks.

Tasks may be dropped on others to establish relationships, child tasks can be created by tapping and holding on a task and the hierarchical display may be expanded or collapsed.

Tasks can also be set to repeat with nagging reminders and start and completion dates entered.

Pocket PC Pocket Informant 2005 Review Notes

Here’s where we were very disappointed.

Unlike the simplicity of Palm’s ‘Memos’, the handling of notes is a real half arsed affair in Pocket Informant – the display is a real dog to get around, and everything seems needlessly complicated.

Sure, the improved text formatting is a nice touch, but finding, organising and categorising notes seems a needlessly tiresome chore.

I hope the Pocket Informant developers – who have a well earned reputation for listening to their punters – take a long hard look at how programs like Agendus on the Palm handle notes and learn from their experience.

Conclusion

Apart from the clunky horror of the Notes interface, it’s easy to see why Pocket Informant has become the most popular PIM application on the Pocket PC.

The program does an admirable job of making it easy for users to search find, organise and display content on the small screen of a Pocket PC and provides excellent value at $29.95 (~€24.5~£16.50).

With its extraordinary amount of user-configurable options, the program can be tailored to fit individual requirements, and with ample power under the hood, it can easily grow with the user’s needs.

Although the sheer range of options can confuse new users (us included), the intuitive, usable defaults make it easy to get started with the program.

Whether many users will ever get around to discovering the true power of the program is another matter, however.

We still think, however, that it’s the best PIM application available for the Pocket PC with only the poor support for Notes preventing it getting our very top rating.

Digital-Lifestyles score: 4/5

Price: $29.95 (~€24.50, ~£16.50)
Buy now online at PocketGear – Special Offer $22.95 until 30 Sep.05

Further information Pocket Informant

UltraMon Review: Multi-Monitor Utility (5/5 Stars)

Review: UltraMon Multi-Monitor Utility Following on from his review of the Viewsonic VP191s, Mike covers a software utility that works your two screen setup hard.

It wasn’t long ago that fancy twin monitor sets ups were the sole preserve of hotshot traders, high-flying graphics pros and, err, security guards, but recent price crashes have seen flat-screen multi-screen set ups becoming more affordable.

Although XP comes with basic twin monitor support as standard, keeping track of all your open applications over two (or more) screens can soon become a pain.

Under XP, arranging windows on each of the different displays involves dragging and dropping them all over the place, and with the taskbar only appearing on the primary monitor, things can soon get confusing.

Ultramon is a smarty-pants application that helps sort out your desktop chaos, making it a breeze to work with multiple displays.

Review: UltraMon Multi-Monitor Utility With support for more than ten monitors, UltraMon adds a raft of user-configurable tools to help users get a manly grip on their acres of screen real estate.

The program adds a taskbar to each monitor, and only shows applications from the monitor it is on – so you won’t have to rummage around a single taskbar any more.

If you drag an application to a different monitor, its taskbar button will be moved to the corresponding taskbar. Neat.

Moving programs around the screen is also made easier with the addition of two new buttons to the title bar.

Review: UltraMon Multi-Monitor Utility These little fellas let you quickly shunt programs across to other screens with a single click, or maximise a single window across the entire desktop.

Shortcuts can be configured for moving and maximizing windows, with UltraMon’s full range of options available by right clicking on the icon in the taskbar.

Amongst its multifarious options, you can create shortcuts that open programs on a specific monitor or at a specific position, or even configure the program to change the display settings before launching an application and then restoring them when the program is closed.

These settings can also be configured by opening the properties of an existing Windows shortcut and fiddling about in the new tabs added by UltraMon.

Keyboard shortcuts can be set up for moving and maximising screens, with ‘display profiles’ letting you quickly change the settings of one or more monitors for each user.

Review: UltraMon Multi-Monitor Utility The program also lets you stretch desktop wallpapers and screen savers across multiple screens or set a different picture and screen saver for each screen, which can look way cool!

After running UltraMon for just a few minutes we realised that we could never go back to the clunky, fiddly ways of Windows, so for anyone look to get the best out of their multi-screen set-up, we can thoroughly recommend the program.

Score: 5/5

UltraMon
Cost: $39.95 (~£22~€33)

Pixel Ads; gWiFi; WoW Plague – Teenage Tech News Review

Neat Idea!
A UK student has thought up a unique way of financing his way through university: Selling online advertising space. That on its own isn’t unique, but the twist he has applied to it is: He is selling it by the pixel on his “Million Dollar Homepage”.

This guy is getting so much media attention as a result of the novelty value of his site that a lot of companies are getting interested in buying pixels from him. The going rate is $1/pixel, and there are 1,000,000 up for grabs… I wonder if he can make it to a million bucks?

This revenue concept started me thinking about what I could do to finance my way through University… I have just under 3 years to come up with something, and it better be good! It seems that finding a niche in the market for something unique and not actually that useful, and then attracting a load of media attention to give it artificial value is a good way of making cash on the Internet. Look out for me following suit in a few year’s time!

Wifi They’ve done it again
Done what? I hear you ask. Google have launched a Beta version of their Wi-Fi service following a host of rumours since an article mentioning a possible Google Wi-Fi appeared in Business 2.0 back in August.

The service is only available in selected parts of San Francisco Bay (well two locations) for now, but knowing Google I am sure that it will spread relatively quickly.

Part of the evidence is a new product, for free download, that basically works as a VPN client and encrypts all data sent over the Google Wi-Fi hotspots to secure it. Only downside with this is that this application could cause privacy concerns, as Google will apparently record data about people’s Web-browsing habits. Still, it has to be paid for somehow and recording the sites people visit fits in with their analysis of the Web so as to aid its online advertising business, Ad-sense. A link to Google’s FAQ about their Secure Access product can be found here.

From the point of view of a teenager like me, this sort of service is very good: I don’t personally mind giving up a small amount of my privacy to be able to use a service that I could no way afford if it wasn’t free. Hell, at 16 I’m not even legally allowed a credit card with which to pay for commercial Wi-Fi services!

As regular readers, Mike caught this story earlier on in the week.

World of Warcraft It’s like the Middle Ages all over again!
This story is quite apt as I am currently suffering from the current real-life equivalent of the virtual plague documented by The Register. Yes, that’s right, I’ve caught the flu :-(

Anyway, according to The Register, World of Warcraft, a popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), has been hit by a plague. Blizzard, the company behind the hugely succesful game, introduced a new god character to their game called Hakkar. What’s special about him is that he carries some sort of disease, similar to HIV, that spreads to some of the people that he attacks. These people then spread the disease further and further, which has resulted in a large quantity of the World of Warcraft servers becoming infected by it.

It’s a new concept and just brings us even closer to where we start blurring the line between reality and virtual reality. It also shows that virtual reality can have all the nasties that the real world does too.

Anyway, I am off to bed, forget World of Warcraft, I’m ill and need to go to school tomorrow. Just hope I don’t spread the “plague”>

Resco Explorer Review: For Pocket PC (5/5 Stars)

Resco Explorer 5.2 For Pocket PC Review With Pocket PCs offering more and more storage space and applications shunting files all over the place, it’s getting increasingly difficult to manage the data held on a handheld device.

With the default Pocket PC File Explorer being as powerful as a tired gnat, Resco Explorer 5.2 could prove a godsend for Pocket PC users keen to keep their devices in order.

Offering built-in file viewing, ZIP file support, encryption, storage card formatting, FTP capabilities and a Registry editor, this fella is like a supercharged file browser on steroids.

Resco Explorer 5.2 For Pocket PC Review Serving up an arm-long list of features, Resco manages to combine the functions of a host of different applications and meld them into one sophisticated, do-it-all, integrated solution.

It may have a ton of power under the hood, but thankfully you don’t need a degree in Advanced Boffinery to get around the program.

Resco’s simple two-pane interface and hierarchical file structure makes it easy to rummage through Pocket PC files and folders (including those stored in ROM and on storage cards), and perform a range of basic actions via a menu, icon bar or tap-and-hold menu – just like a desktop PC.

Resco Explorer 5.2 For Pocket PC Review Files can be encrypted from within the program (and from a desktop applet) enabling data to be organised and secured within the same interface. Neat.

Network support is built in, letting users browse the files of connected machines, and there’s also HP Mobile Printing support (via an optional free download), FTP support, tap-and-hold menus for beaming (via Infrared and Bluetooth) or emailing any file, drag-and-drop of files and folders as well as storage card formatting.

Resco Explorer 5.2 For Pocket PC Review Add to that the improved support for compression – letting users save files at different levels of compression – and a new Today plug-in providing on battery status and free storage/memory and you’ve got a Five Star application that is an absolute must for all Pocket PC users.

Highly recommended.
Digital-Lifestyles score: 5/5

Price: $24.95 (~€20, ~£13.50)
Buy now online at PocketGear

Further information Resco Explorer 5.2