Spb Wallet

Review: Spb Wallet

Spb Wallet is a new program designed to securely store all those pesky passwords, pins and logins that plague our day in the modern world. Do you, like me, need to remember seven different items that shouldn’t be written down before you can do any work in the morning? Read on to find out if Spb have an answer for this plague of modern life. Thanks to Fedor Ezhov of Spb Software House for providing a review copy. Supplier Spb Software House Product Spb Wallet Cost $29.95 Discounts for existing customers Supplier Web Site Spb Software House

Introduction
Tolkein wrote:
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all,
and in the darkness bind them

I don’t think Tolkein foresaw wallet programs, but that’s how they work. One password to rule all the passwords, and bind them in the encrypted darkness away from prying eyes. It does of course all hinge on being able to remember that one password in the first place!


Basics

Spb have taken the wallet metaphor literally in their graphics for this program. All the information to be stored is presented in the form of ‘cards’. This makes a colourful user interface that is easy to grasp. Cards are placed in folders and folders are grouped together into wallets, each wallet being stored in its own file. The program can handle multiple wallets, each with its own password. This would enable you to have some information in a wallet where someone else knows the password, say for shared work information, but still keep your financial passwords to yourself. I can only see a use for this in the context of synchronising to the PC and using the PC part of the program, which I have not looked at in depth for this review.

Installation

A cab installer is offered for standalone use, and a Windows installer that includes the Windows program too. The cab installer worked flawlessly. The Windows version irritated me a bit by asking for all other applications to be closed. I know that the reason for doing this is the way Windows handles dlls, and is not Spb’s responsibility, but it does still interrupt workflow. One good feature of the desktop installer, fairly standard now for Spb I think, is the opportunity to enter the registration code during the install process instead of a separate step afterwards. Installs on WM6, WM5 and PPC2003 were fine. Testing for this review has been done mainly on WM5 with a small amount on PPC2003, which is why there are screenshots in different theme colours. There is a trial version of the program available. It offers full functionality, time limited for a generous 15 days. Full marks to Spb; I wish other developers of utilities would do the same.

Cards

Cards can be based on built in templates, such as a passport or a credit card, with preconfigured images and fields. Or you can edit the card contents yourself, and create your own templates. As an example of how cards can be used to store more or less anything, the Help included with Spb Wallet is in the form of cards. The landscape version above is a pretty picture; the text comes up by selecting the Fields soft key. There are a couple of small niggles with the Notes field. First the notes only occupy a column about two-thirds the width of the screen, in either portrait or landscape. It would be much better if after the title ‘Notes’ the contents were full width, in order to see more. There’s an option to turn the graphics off, but all that does is move the text column up the screen. Second, and more irritatingly, the field for entering text writes all on one line until the user puts in a carriage return – like using Notepad with word wrap turned off.

Cards open in view mode so that you can use the information, without any danger of unintentionally changing anything. Change to Edit mode to make alterations. Card fields of certain types link into other programs. Tapping on the web site address in a card launches the default browser, going online to do so. Tapping on an email address creates a blank email to that address. Tapping on a phone number brings up a bubble asking whether to dial that number. All good stuff built in at the outset for phone edition users. Seems like the philosophy of write an app for PPCs then bolt on phone features later is going out of fashion.

Folders

The screen in the introduction shows the folders that Spb supply. However the user has complete freedom to add to, delete or rename these. A default card type can be set for each folder. So my life might look like the one in this illustration! The stripes can be removed from the list and folders can be presented as icons in a grid instead of a list.

Password generation

Including a password generator in a wallet program is very useful for creating website passwords to be used on the same device as the wallet. While editing a card tap and hold in a password field opens a submenu that includes a built in password generator. There are recommended combinations of length and characters for normal, strong and very strong passwords. If these choices don’t meet your needs, then you can set a custom combination instead. For instance, suppose I want a very strong password for logging into my company network, to keep out all those nosy colleagues. I start by selecting very strong, but find that this allows spaces in the password, and the corporate password policy doesn’t. So I deselect spaces, and the strength changes to Custom, but I know that it is only a tiny bit weaker. This customisation ability is very good. So full marks for included functionality. The password generator mostly works fine when generating at lower strength settings. But at the higher settings the generated password does not always contain all the elements selected, which is infuriating if you are trying to meet a request for a particular type of password. It seems particularly fond of not including spaces when asked to. The screenshot shows a password I generated asking for lowercase and numbers, with a pronounceable result. There are no numbers in it. If Spb’s generator can’t include numbers in a pronounceable password, then the program should warn me about this when I tick the checkbox for pronounceable.

Security

The contents of this wallet program can be the keys to the user’s entire life, so security really matters. Spb use 256 AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption to store the data that you enter. A quick look at a couple of the competing wallet programs shows that they use the same type of encryption, so at the moment Spb’s encryption is as good as it gets. One big danger with Pocket PC wallet programs is leaving them open in the background when dismissing them by using the red X at top right. Personally I wish that Spb would defy Microsoft convention, and the user’s normal settings, to make the X always a close button for wallet, but they haven’t and that wouldn’t suit some users. Instead there’s an option to lock the wallet automatically after a configurable period of 1-60 minutes. The default setting is to lock after 30 minutes which is a reasonable choice, but why oh why can auto-locking be turned off? There is no point in a wallet program that stays open, in fact its more dangerous than not having a wallet program in the first place! There is an option to clean up the clipboard on exit, so that any data you have copied and pasted out of the wallet is removed. The default for this setting is on, which is good. Each wallet is only as secure as the password you put on it. For me it is a must that this should be the strongest password that I can actually remember. Spb thoughtfully provide their own input mechanism so that any key-logging program cannot grab the password during input. Good idea. But like so many of the good ideas in this program, it comes with a problem. And this time it’s a big problem. Spb’s own input mechanism will only do digits and letters in upper or lower case; it does not handle special characters like punctuation. When it comes to the contents of my bank account, that level of password just isn’t good enough. So to enter a password of the strength I want I have to go back to normal input methods. At the moment this is low risk on the PPC, but would be a higher risk than I’m willing to accept for the PC program. To be fair, other Wallet software programs don’t provide this level of security either, or don’t have a PC app at all. Nevertheless the problem is enough for me to decide that although I might continue using Spb Wallet for logins and door codes, I am not going to enter any passwords with access to any of my finances. And so far I have not found a wallet app for desktop and Pocket PC that is secure enough for me to use. And a little personal security note: all data in this review is fake, including the description of the husband as boring!

Performance
Spb Wallet runs as quickly as any program on my PPC. It hasn’t had a thorough performance workout, as I haven’t put enough data in. Early versions of more than one Spb program had memory leaks, using up free memory until the device slowed to a crawl. I haven’t sent this with Spb Wallet. I am slightly concerned though that while testing the program my device has frozen and I’ve had to do a couple of soft resets per day, whereas my Trinity normally goes for weeks without needing one. So there’s a question mark about the quality of the programming.


Untested Features

The main features I have not tested are the PC application, and synchronisation. Adjacent there is a screenshot from Spb of the Windows app showin some of the 60 predefined templates included. There is a web forum for swapping templates with other users.

Value for Money
There is a lot in this application for the $29.95 price tag, which is higher than we are used to seeing on PPC programs only, but remember it includes a PC program too. If you don’t need a PC program then competing programs offer PPC only versions at lower prices, which Spb don’t. The price point for the package is the same as the competition, but Spb have a points system to reward existing customers for loyalty, which will make it cheaper. For those who need all its features and are prepared to accept the level of security offered it is decent value.


Summary
Pros
60 templates
Colourful slick presentation
Complete flexibility of folders
Multiple wallets with different security levels
High encryption standard
Launch browser, email and phone from stored data
Long 15 day trial


Cons
Wallet password with special characters cannot be entered without standard input methods
Password generator sometimes misses out specified elements
Notes wording not full width so hard to read
Background locking can be turned off
No PPC only version without the desktop program
Soft resets needed while using the program


Conclusion
Spb have entered the existing market for wallet programs with a splash with this tasty looking application. There are some minor irritations that I expect Spb will iron out over the next few versions but a question mark as to the quality of the programming.

As this program has only just been released I haven’t had long to test it, and because of the nature of it so far all the data I’ve entered for the review has been fake. The real test for me will come when I enter real information, and the trial period runs out, will I still be using it and would I be prepared to pay the price? Definitely not, because until Spb fix the wallet password entry of special characters, I am not prepared to use the desktop program. For PPC use only the competing products offer the same level of security and are cheaper, although not quite as slickly presented.

So for me this is a near miss, which won’t take much effort to convert into a market leader, but for now I don’t recommend it.