When I first saw i-Launcher 3.1 I was struck by how nice it looked! It is a colourful and vibrant looking application that has really good quality graphics.
INTRODUCTION
WHAT’S HOT
- Floating panels
- These allow you to select the tabs so you can see the shortcuts available without having to change screens in anyway.
- The tabs are thumb size so good for users who use their thumbs and or fingers on the touch screens of their PDA’s. This is not so easy though when it comes to using the menus in the tabs. These are fiddly and so its best to use the stylus to set your tabs up and customise them.
- Good customisation ability
- You can set the tabs up to have the shortcuts that you want, where you want them. This makes i-Launcher 3.1 quick and easy to use. The only problem is that you run the risk of taking a long time to get the tabs set up the way you want. There are so many options and settings that can be chosen from, I would say keep it simple or you will bury yourself in detail…more on this later!
- Enhanced Task Manager
- As well as being able to close applications, it has a ‘Launch’ bar on it that allows you to access the shortcuts on any of the tabs and also has shortcuts on it such as ‘Off’ and ‘Soft re-set’. The content of it can all be set from ‘Options’ in the tab menu…but you have to find it first!
- Safe Protection Mode
- I can understand the Safe Protection mode being useful if you install a lot of applications on your phone, but if you are like me and do not do this, I can not see the Safe Mode being used very much. I have certainly never found a use for this type of feature before.
- New icons
- There are icons for features such as ‘soft re-set’, ‘power off’, ‘screen rotation’, ‘switch-tab’ and ‘minimise mode’. The ‘soft re-set’ and ‘power off’ are useful. The ‘minimise mode’ though was not as user-friendly as one would like it to be…see my list of bugs in Bugs and Wishes!
- Alpha blending
- Used on the icons makes them more visually appealing making the overall look and feel more sophisticated but beauty, as they say, is only skin deep!!
SETUP
Once installed, the application gives you a 12 day free trial before registering it. I would recommend taking advantage of this as you may find that at first sight it looks good due to the enhanced quality of the icons, but for all the time you can spend playing around with the settings, and getting the tabs set up right and working out the easiest way to carry out using this application, you may find you do not have much of your free trial period left to actually use i-Launcher!
PRODUCT FEATURES
Tabs and floating panels
The five default tabs are Home, Games, Documents, Settings and Tools. They each come with a set of shortcuts to give users an initial start into using i-Launcher. This is very helpful and at least allows you to get a feel for the application.
On the left is the Home tab, and on the right is the Games tab.
On the left is the Documents tab, and on the right is the Settings tab.
And finally, we have the tools tab.
However, if you are like me, there is not a lot to keep you occupied before you start to ask yourself, "What else can I do with this?" That was about 30 seconds for me! So I held my stylus down on the ‘Home’ tab and sure enough a menu appeared!
Tab Menu
The tab menu is the same in each tab regardless of the shortcuts that are in it.
This is the Tab menu. The initial option is ‘Modify Image’ which allows you to select a different image for your icon.
The ‘Modify Image’ option is also available on the menu for the shortcut icons themselves.
This is the image selection screen for Windows Mobile icons and unavailable ‘Modify Image’ option
However you will find that it will tell you that there are no compatible images in the directory or the option will be greyed out. The start of a lot of unnecessary menu items.
With this menu, you can adjust the icon size.
To save space you can choose the small icons on the left, or get a larger picture with the bigger icons on right.
The ‘Override Icons’ option in the tab menu allows you to simply place the icons by default to the left, right, centre etc,
Alternatively, you can spend precious moments moving the icons around by using ‘Free Icon Placement’.
So this brings us to the ‘Captions Enabled for Tab’ option. In principle, a good idea considering that by SBSH’s own admission they have introduced some new icons. As you can see though, they are very poorly designed…for more on this go to ‘Bugs and Wishes’ on page 2.
‘Add Shortcut’ allows users to add a new shortcut to the tab so providing the first useful piece of customisation. You can select shortcuts to any document, program or file in your PDA making it much quicker and easier to access than having to drill down through file structures. Plus, if you are like me and do not know where some of these things are saved, it is really good to have them saved as a shortcut.
What is more, if you do not want a shortcut on your tab, you can simply delete it by activating the icon menu (rather than the tab menu) and selecting ‘Delete’. For me, icons for things such as the memory meter are not at all useful as a I do not spend my time adding and removing software so I do not particularly need to know how much memory space I have. Whilst talking about the icon menu, you also have the option here to move or copy shortcuts between the tabs. This again is a very useful and easy feature that thankfully is not buried in a deeper menu structure somewhere.
The ‘Refresh i-Launcher’ option appeared to do nothing. Then we come to ‘Options’.
Tab/Options Menu
Within this menu option alone are a further five tabs – Options, Shortcuts, Tabs, Register and About, becoming four once you have registered your copy of i-Launcher. In addition, in the ‘Options’ tab there are 10 further settings menus for your consideration. I will be honest, when I first saw this, I jumped straight to the ‘Shortcuts’ tab to avoid that drop-down menu. Not this time though, we will address the options in ‘Options’ once we have reviewed the other options we have!! Oh there are a lot of options in i-Launcher"!!
Tab/Options/Options
Despite i-Launcher looking on the face of it to be only 5 tabs, each holding a selection of shortcuts, there are a lot of settings in the background that can be changed.
The central list of options is dynamic, depending on your selection from the drop-down list at the top of the screen. Each setting on the central window has a brief explanation against it to give you an idea of what it will do. I stress ‘give you an idea’. If you are new to applications like this, some of these settings are a little alien. Again, I would suggest you refer to the user manual for more details. There are probably in the region of about 60/70 different configuration settings in this tab alone and to explain all of them would make this a very long review. I honestly found that I did not need to revert to any of these except to maybe try and fix a couple of problems such as the badly sized captions and the top bar menu issues (see Bugs and Wishes on page 2).
Tab/Options/Shortcuts
In the Shortcuts tab you can add, remove and place the shortcuts within each of the tabs. You select a tab from the drop-down at the top and then amend the shortcuts accordingly. This is a continuation of the ‘Add Shortcut’ option in the Tab menu as it provides more customisation options.
Especially the option to customise the ‘Shell Tray Tab’ (as shown above) where the ‘Power Off’ shortcut has been added to the Shell tray Tab, and once saved, this now appears in the bottom right of the screen. It is now easy to turn the PDA off from the Today screen. You could ask though, why not access this menu from the ‘Add Shortcut’ option in the Tab menu? It would make life in i-Launcher one step or two easier?!!
Tab/Options/Tabs
This bit to me is a great selling point for i-Launcher and maybe the developers at SBSH should think of a way to make this menu more accessible. It allows you to take the default tabs and change them to the tabs you want by either adding new ones and deleting the old ones, or just changing the current ones. Name the tabs as you require them to be named, then go back to the ‘Shortcuts’ tab and add the shortcuts you want. These 2 tabs alone make this application for me, I did not need any of the other options that i-Launcher attempts to offer you.
Tab/Options/Register
The register tab is used the once to register your copy of i-Launcher 3.1 using a username and key that is emailed to you. This tab disappears once you have registered your copy.
HELP SUPPORT
The manual can be downloaded in word or PDF formats in American (English!) or German! Some of the diagrams in the manual are of a poor quality, but you can understand what they are trying to say. The application does not provide any kind of help function. There are some brief descriptions in the ‘Options’ section of the tab menu however these still do not help you if you need instruction on HOW to do something, rather than WHAT something is. My advice would be to download the user manual.
i-Launcher can be used on Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Mobile 6 Pro and Classic.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
BUGS AND WISHES
Running Programmes on the Top Menu Bar
You can set the Top Menu bar up so that icons sit on it to show you the programs that are running.
This is optional, and I would advise you to not opt for it as the compact space means that the icons sit over the top of any default icons and words such as ‘Start’ that are already there. This looks messy and makes me think that the developers were just starting to try and cram as much as they could in without thinking about appearances as well.
Lucky therefore that one of the uses of one of the configuration settings on the Tab/Options/Options tab is to switch this off!!
Minimise/Maximise i-Launcher
There is the option to have Minimise/Maximise i-Launcher as a shortcut on any one of the tabs. Beware of this as firstly I am not sure why you would need it as the tabs take up minimal space anyway, and secondly, once minimised the tabs can only be maximised by a very complicated process.
Open the Task Manager, select ‘Launch’, ‘Home’ (as this is the tab that the shortcut is saved in). Select the ‘Minimise/Maximise i-Launcher’ option again. The i-Launcher tabs are replaced.
This is very un-user friendly and certainly caused me a few minutes of consternation trying to work it out. I have to be honest and own up to the fact that I had to ask my husband to have a look in the end as I was getting so frustrated with it! Do not use this functionality if you are ever in a hurry….as I usually am!!
‘Captions Enabled for Tab’ feature
Another issue I have is with the captions that can be enabled for the shortcuts in each tab.
As the first diagram shows, when the captions are enabled, there is not enough room for the shortcuts and the captions. The longer ones such as ‘calculator’ are cut off at the start and end of the word because the default font size for the captions is too large for the icons! One option was to make the icons smaller but this did not fix the problem. Alternatively, captions settings can be changed if you delve into the ‘Options’ menu (see Tab/Options menu) where under ‘Captions settings’ you can adjust the font, the font size, the caption height and the captions width to allow the captions to be read in full from end to end. See what happens when I adjust the font size from 12 to 10 and increase the caption width and height….
Does that look any better to you? The fact that the application has been released like this amazes me! Did anyone review this internally and if so, who ever thought this was acceptable? It cries out once again of poor development either through lack of concern or being late for their tea!
Adding a shortcut to a tab
The feature I love about i-Launcher is being able to add and remove your own shortcuts to the tabs. I was therefore very disappointed to find that this too was a poor piece of programming.
In this example I added the ‘calendar’ shortcut to the the Home tab and rather than expand the tab to take another shortcut, it has simply put the new shortcut icon over the top of an existing shortcut icon. This now means that the ‘Free Placement’ feature needs to be switched on and the icons manually moved to make them fit the tab. This is again a fiddly and inconvenient thing to have to do.
PURCHASING
PROS
- Icons look great
Floating panels
Customization of the tabs
- Inexpensive
CONS
Too many options in the Tab/Options menu
Icon captions – just forget them, you are better off without!
Minimize/maximize feature is far too complicated in comparison to the rest of the application
- Additional shortcuts that sit on top of existing shortcuts
| Value |  |
| Ease of Use |
 |
| Features |  |
Overall |
|
i-Launcher is quick and easy to use….once
OVERALL IMPRESSION
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