Organizing Programs on a Pocket PC: Part 1 of 2

In my post the other day on Magic Button, I committed to telling you how to get along without a program launcher. I will do that in the Part 2 of this post. In this post, we will talk about using program launchers, since many who are new to Pocket PCs may not be familiar with them. Note that this post and its Part 2 (to appear tomorrow or Wednesday) fall into the “time-savers” category: having quick ways of launching your programs can be a time saver, because they keep you from having to scroll through a long list of programs to find the one you want to use.

Using a program launcher, such as Pocket Plus or iLauncher or Wisbar Advance, is smart if you don’t have to worry about the amount of memory consumed by the launcher. You’ll probably only want to use the method I describe in Part 2 only if

• You are worried about how much memory the program launchers take up, and/or
• You use a Pocket PC that was upgraded from Windows Mobile 2003 to Windows Mobile 5 (such as a Dell x50v of an iPAQ 4700). In this case, you do not want to install a program launcher if you don’t have to because the more programs you install on these device, especially the larger the programs, the more it tends to cause “stalls” during the operating system’s memory management sessions. (This doesn’t happen with all large programs, such as those you install to an SD card, but it happens with program launchers which really need to be installed to main memory).

The following figure from my x51v shows the program launcher Spb Pocket Plus “at work” on my Today screen. By a single tap of an icon in this screen, I can launch a program. Programs shown on this “Main” tab are Excel Mobile, Word Mobile, Notes, PowerPoint Mobile, and Listpro. There is also a “Suspend” icon and icons showing the battery and memory levels. If I were to click the “Media” tab, I would have immediate click access to Microsoft Reader, eReader Pro, and a half dozen other apps that I consider “media-related.”

Setting these tabs up was extraordinarily easy, as all I had to do was select programs for each (user-definable) tab from a menu such as shown in the following screenshot:

So, if you have the memory (and many Smartphone and Pocket PC devices do have adequate memory), using a launcher such as Spb Pocket Plus can save you time in launching apps (and can also display useful info for you, such as battery level). Out of the three launchers I have mentioned, I actually like Wisbar Advance the most: it takes up virtually no screen real estate and there are some great skin designs available (such as by Juni) that make it look really, really good. However, it tends to require more memory than the other launchers do and is a bit more difficult to set up. iLauncher is the one of the three that requires the least memory and it is easy to set up. But, any of these can serve you well and it is just a matter of preference (or memory needs) that determine which is best for you.

For those of you who use launcher, which one do you use and what do you like/dislike about it?