Eten M500 - Part II - Applications

Eten M500 Pocket PC Review Part II -The Internal Applications Supplier : SmartDevicesDirect.com Manufacturer: Eten Product : Eten M500 Pocket Pc Colour : Black/Silver Cost : £299 ex vat; £351.32 inc VAT Supplier Product Web Site: Eten M500 PocketPC Home Page : SmartDevicesDirect Welcome to part II of the ETEN M500 Review here at 4WM. This part of the review will concentrate on the internal applications that come as part of the standard package, and with the M500, that standard package contains a lot more than most Pocket PCs I have been fortunate to get my hands on. So please read on, and I hope this review proves to be informative & enjoyable!! Once again, many thanks to Nick France from www.smartdevicesdirect.com for providing us with the ETEN M500 review unit!! Boot Time I was seriously impressed by the M500 at the initial start up! When I turned on the device I was offered with the choice to restore from my latest backup. And under further investigation, this is part of the default behaviour of the M500. This behaviour is triggered by the existence of a backup file on the internal flash-drive, previously created by the additional backup software included by ETEN. Not being one to RTFM, it was lucky that a backup file had been left from a previous review, or I may have missed this excellent piece of functionality. The custom option allows you to select which backup set to use. I can see a great possibility for using multiple custom builds here, depending on what you want to do. Given the Backup tools ability to just backup personal data as well, you could swap between multiple application builds and restore current personal data. If no backup set exists after a hard reset, the ETEN M500 assumes that this is the first time that it has been switched on, and runs a configuration setup wizard. Another great feature aimed at new users of Pocket PC devices, making them a good deal friendlier in my opinion. The wizard allows you to initially configure the UI aspects of the M500 from the defaults, without having to delve into the manual to find out what each setting means. Configuration options cover the Phone & Hardware Buttons. The remaining configuration panels offer the ability to customise the Screen & Connection Settings. Although I didn’t have much luck with the Connection Settings, as the drop down boxes where empty, probably due to the fact that the M500 is sold offline by Smart Devices Direct. The Today Screen As with the majority of Pocket PC devices, well, all that I’ve seen, the usual today screen suspects, Time & Date, Owner Information, Messaging, Tasks & Calendar are all present & correct on initial boot of the M500. The initial today screen is the first point where the ETEN differs from the rest of the crowd, no standard blue today screen, a custom theme that matches the ETEN’s box livery, and an extra today screen plug-in is present. The plug-in is known as Quick Link, but that’s all I’m going to give you here, more on Quick Link later in the review. Standard Applications I won’t go into too much detail here, as I’m sure everyone is fully aware & fully up to date on the standard application offerings of the Windows Mobile 2003SE platform, but suffice to say, everything is present & correct, just as it should be! Office/Productivity • Calendar • Tasks • Messaging • Pocket Word • Pocket Excel • Notes • Calculator Connectivity/Internet • Pocket Internet Explorer • MSN Messenger • Terminal Services Client Games • Jawbreaker • Solitaire Additional Applications This is where the M500 comes into its own, ETEN have provided an absolute dearth of extra functionality within the device as part of the standard package. They have done a really good job of customising the Windows Mobile platform, and stamping their own original mark on the package as a whole. There is a lot to get through, and I want to include as much as possible here to give you a full insight into just how well ETEN have done here!! Utility As mentioned earlier in the review making it a good place to start, our first additional application is Quick Link. Quick Link does exactly as the name suggests, and provides a quick link to your favourite applications from the today screen. The application is probably best described as a no frills application launcher that is very effective at what it does. I’ve found myself continuing to use it throughout my time with the M500 whilst putting it through its paces for the review. Configuration is also straight forward & simple and is accessed via the Today applet under settings. Quick Link gives you the ability to select which applications you wish to use, whilst also allowing you to control the size of the icons, well, whether they are big or small, the position of the icons within the bar, and the number of lines containing icons to display in the today screen plug-in. Top marks to ETEN for providing this straight out of the tin. Next in line is M-DASH, a tabbed application launcher, which can be likened to applications like Spb’s Pocket Plus and Omega One’s Battery Pack Pro, with the main difference with M-Dash being the absence of a today screen plug-in, although that being said, M-Dash does have its very own hardware button above the call end key allowing you to launch it quickly and easily when required. M-Dash isn’t just an application launcher, it also carries the same range of system meters as the aforementioned third-party add-ons, which is pretty impressive when you bear in mind that this is included as part of the default package. The M-Dash application itself is fully configurable, allowing you to easily select which applications & shortcuts you wish to see in each tab. You can also rename the tabs, but this is where I came across the first limitation, you are limited to 4 tabs, there is no facility to add any more, which isn’t too much of a worry, because I think there is enough space to accommodate most users. The ETEN M500 comes with a more comprehensive backup application as standard. I never really used the built-in offering that came with my XDA-II, preferring & indeed purchasing Sprite Backup to fulfil this need. Installing Sprite wasn’t necessary with the ETEN, as the pre-loaded backup utility offers the exact same basic core functionality, but please bear in mind that Sprite Backup has many more advanced functions, and the ability to select down to the file level, which isn’t available on the M500 version, which allows you to backup all data, or just personal data. The restore function is simplicity in itself, allowing you to select whether to use the latest backup found, or select the file you require from your chosen location. All in all, the backup facilities of the M500 are excellent, and I’ve found them more than adequate to look after my data! Another useful utility included by ETEN is Format FlashDisk. The name says it all really, it allows you to format the M500’s internal flash disk. It’s a pity it is limited to the flash disk, as this would have been a very useful tool for formatting SD cards as well, in my opinion, a bit of an oversight! The Scan Disk option scans the Flash Disk and reports on its health and fragmentation level. I couldn’t get a screen snap of this for some reason that I couldn’t put my finger on, so accept my apologies here! Telephony Moving on to the Telephonic aspects of the M500, I found that ETEN has also extended the functionality in this area as well, once again increasing the usability of the device straight out of the box. First off we have Scenarios. This application brings a similar sort of functionality to profiles that can be found on most mobile phones to the ETEN M500. The Scenarios application allows you to configure 4 states for the Phone, System Sounds & Backlight functionality of the PDA. Whilst this is a great addition, allowing you to control the volume & vibrate functionality of the phone, it does not allow you to select a custom ringtone for each scenario, which is a feature I really missed. Another interesting point was Smart Voice, which allows you to configure the M500 to play the sound from a call through both the earphones and the loudspeaker on the device at the same time! You can also select an option to allow the device to autoadjust the backlight, based on the capacity left in the battery, which could prove very useful if your away from mains power for long stretches of time. Next in the Phone camp we have Call Filter, which as the name suggests allows provides you with the ability to filter calls, giving you total control over who you speak to! Now I found this to be a very worthwhile application, and while I was on a weeks leave last week, I added my company’s switchboard number to the Block List, absolute heaven, not one call got through to annoy me whilst enjoying time with my family!! So, extra top marks to ETEN for including this with the M500. The row of Icons at the bottom of the screen from left to right allow you to add & remove Allow & Block list entries, view the Blocked Call history, access the application configuration tabs, search your list entries and display the program about information. Configuration is a breeze, the ‘Call’ tab, allows you to select whether you wish to accept allow list calls only, accept all calls, hang up block list calls or hang up all calls. The ‘History’ tab allows you to define how much history you wish to keep, based on options specifying one day, three days or a week. The ‘Synchronize’ tab allows you to sync the Allow & Block list with your contacts, and if the number is found, the list will be populated with the corresponding name. The ‘Status’ tab allows you to control whether or not the Call Filter Icon is present on the today screen. If enabled, it appears in the bottom right hand corner. Caller Recognition fills the gap left by Scenarios, in that it allows the configuration of not only custom ring-tones on a caller by caller basis, but also a background picture to be displayed when a call is received. Moving on from Call Filter, we come to Voice Commander. Once again ETEN have truly excelled here by including Voice Recognition software by default, described by the about screen as being supplied by Cyberon Corporation, not a company I’ve heard of before. Voice Commander provides not only the ability to dial contacts & numbers, but also allows you to launch other programs, and even better, read you your upcoming list of appointments, as well as your SMS & Email messages. I must say I was very impressed with Voice Commander. I don’t usually use voice control software, as I find them a bit hit and miss with recognition accuracy. Although the ability to train Voice Commander by replacing the default voice tags is available, it can be put to work straight out of the tin, which I must admit, suited me down to the ground, as I never seem to find the time or the inclination to sit in a quiet room and record tags for everything I wish to use it for. VC does still throw up the occasional oddity, but its accuracy has been better than anything I’ve used in the past, hitting the nail on the head 8 times out of 10 consistently with contact dialling, whereas I had no end of trouble with the digit dial, failing to get it to recognise any numbers apart from 123. As well as being able to train VC using voice tags for contacts & applications, you can also train it to recognise individual digits, although I’m not really sure what ‘Use adapted model means’. Under the advanced tab, you can also control the length of the phone numbers, which sets limits on what you can dial using the ‘digit dial’ facility! In addition to this you can set a sensitivity level, choosing from Normal, Sensitive or Accurate. I got good results on Normal, slightly worse results with Accurate, but better results with Sensitive. System ETEN have made a few modifications to the standard applets that come as part of the standard Windows Mobile 2003SE build, so in this section I will introduce you to a few of those changes that may be of interest! The first changes I noticed were to the Power applet. The initial tab ‘Battery’ is much the same as other Windows Mobile devices, but that is were the similarity ends! The next tab is ‘Wireless’, which is one that I haven’t seen on other devices, it offers another way to control the wireless functionality of the M500, allowing you to set flight mode, where all radio functions are off, or turn the Wireless functions on, but control whether to have Bluetooth only, Phone only or both active. The review continues in the following post!!