T3 App Chart » Windows Mobile

Hot UK Deals

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 01:50:03 GMT

Hot UK Deals is a website that most people seem to know – a community that lets users vote about deals that have been found both on the web and in real life.

The app is an extension of the website in a more touch-friendly format, making it easy to see what’s hot in the world of deals and what isn’t.

You can view by hot deals, discussions and new deals too – and categories help you drill down to the type of thing you want to buy.

However, the navigation isn’t perfect – selecting categories for the ‘hot deals’ section, which is arguably the only place you’d want to do it, yields no change, which is irritating.

But it’s easy to comment and see in real time what people are buying, and having the phone on the go makes it easy to react when a company accidentally sells washing machines for 1p or something.

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SMSTranslator

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:24:08 GMT

We’d imagine if you’re regularly in contact with foreign friends or business partners there could certainly be a level of pressure to learn the language. If not for your own sense of wellbeing but just to speed along communications and get along on a more friendly level.

SMSTranslator is a horrible looking app that offers a totally non-integrated text message system but one that can and will translate both sent and received text messages into a host of foreign languages. The ‘clever’ isn’t in the app as such, it utilises Bing or Google to translate both your outgoing and incoming messages.

It does work, but the big problem is its lack of integration, it has to use its own contacts and messaging system, we can understand that but why put work into developing a usable app just to put no effort into the interface? It makes no sense. It’s a workable solution but not a pretty one and not one that’s integrated into the rest of the system.

Download this app: SMS Translator for Windows Mobile

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Shopping List

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:18:29 GMT

We’re open to the idea that someone can make a usable shopping list, it just happens that time after time we find a simple To Do list serves our purposes better. In most apps by the time you’ve navigated their terrible interface to add an item from a category you could have simply typed the name of the item you wanted. At least Shopping List makes that functional leap and presents what is a relatively easy to populate To Do-style shopping list.

It works as a single shopping list with an Alternative List containing items not already added. You transfer items from this to the active Shopping List along with any note/quantities, though these were never remembered on our phone, which is something of a major drawback. You can tick off items as you go and both categories and individual items are entirely editable. It’s quick to navigate and you can even toggle between a straight list and one sorted into categories. The lack of multiple lists is a shame, the inability to remember notes is annoying and the basic interface design is disappointing.

Download this app: Shopping List for Windows Mobile

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Magic Guidebook

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:13:43 GMT

Location services are a big thing, people want to know what the best nearby restaurant is without having to know that annoying extra detail of where they are. Magic Guidebook does its best to provide this service, if the interface looks familiar that’s because it’s from the same developer as the decent Train Track and Premier League.

So from an ease-of-use perspective it certainly scores well with the good looking menus sliding past slickly. It even does a good job of breaking down local services and attractions, in our far-flung corner of the world it managed to throw up both corner shops and the funeral service, amongst all the other local places.

The category list isn’t the fastest thing to navigate but the real kicker for Magic Guidebook is that Aloqa does all of this for free.

Download this app: Magic Guidebook for Windows Mobile

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RateThings

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:16:31 GMT

It’s amazing how the lack or addition of a couple of key features can make or break an app. It’s also a shame that an app that lets you love or hate things should end up being listed as disliked in itself, but that’s the unfortunate position for RateThings.

It’s a good idea: list photos of things, add a title and description and apply a good/bad or favourite tag to it. The idea being if you want to remember that wine you liked at a later date you can quickly look it up, its own suggestion of listing wine is an excellent one. The problem for RateThings is that its implementation is so rough around the edges it hurts.

For something that exists around photos of items, not linking direct to the camera is remiss. As is not popping up the keyboard when you select a text box. It’s a shame as it potentially genuinely useful.

Buy this app: Rate Things for Windows Mobile

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View2Road

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:11:32 GMT

What could have been a stunningly useful app to keep an eye on the roads actually turns out to be something of a flop.

View2Road promises to give you an eye on the roads by connecting your phone directly to road-side cameras, so you can see the current state of the traffic at various junctions.

Now despite having a comprehensive list of motorway junctions and indeed list of countries including but not limited to the US, UK, France, Australia, Germany, Greece, Spain and Puerto Rico of all places, the actual results are totally useless in that there were no working cameras for the UK at least.

The US seemed to have far more success, while for the rest of the countries the number of roads covered and success of coverage seemed somewhat random, but without actual consistently good coverage it’s as good as useless.

Stupidly the BBC provides a UK-wide selection of ‘jamcams’ that it could easily tap into.

Buy this app: View2Road for Windows Mobile

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Bubble Bash

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:59:20 GMT

If prodding at your phone’s touchscreen sounds like a good time to you then read on!

Bubble Bash is a surprisingly fun matching game, in the Bejewelled style of gameplay you have to double-tap touching groups of the same animal to make them disappear and in the process clear enough of the board to complete the level.

It’s surprisingly well polished with suitably calming background music and good effects. For killing five minutes it’s certainly distracting enough and will happily entertain the smaller member of the family for longer but the lack of variety means it’s not going to keep you interested for much longer.

Download this app: Bubble Bash for Windows Mobile

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Hangman

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:55:21 GMT

It’s the old-school classic way to kill some time. A perfect way to distract the children when you’re in the car, hangman is back but in digital form. While it’s outwardly slick in its presentation, a graphically-grim skeleton slowly builds up to a full corpse that then plummets through the hangman’s trapdoor, it seems to miss a few tricks along the way.

Nothing has changed in the way the game is played, you’re presented with underlined blanks and you get to throw individual letters until you can guess the word. You can break-down the words into categories such as geography and animals, but we’re surprised there’s no difficultly option such as specifying the number of letters or applying a time limit. While a mere 2,000 word dictionary doesn’t sound particularly large to us, but as an hour-long distraction it should pay for itself.

Buy this app: Hangman for Windows Mobile

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OverDrive Media Console

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:49:40 GMT

At first OverDrive Media Console seems like it’s offering something rarely seen with Windows Mobile: a well designed interface. The female narrator of the demo track purrs into your ear about how easy and wonderful a system OverDrive is to use, how it’ll transform your listening-life into something, wonderful. It’s after this taster of audiobook playback nirvana that the stark reality hits, as you begin to wonder how do you actually add files to your device.

Effectively this is a slick frontend to a DRM-designed download system for libraries and third-party digital bookstores. The problem is getting the content is a step that isn’t built into the OverDrive app. This effectively adds extra unnecessary and awkward steps in using what should be a great app. Additionally you can’t just go ‘play this MP3 file’ as OverDrive will just ignore it in disgust, despite proclaiming MP3 compatibility. For library goers that use this system the annoyances will quickly pay off, for everyone else it’ll just put you off.

Download this app: OverDrive Media Console

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Risky Wars

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:45:43 GMT

A game is doing something right when while you’re playing it, that long distant smell of the actual board game you had has a child floats back into memory. That’s exactly what happened while playing Risky Wars, while it’s hardly a classic interpretation of the original game, it does follow the rules almost entirely, right down to collecting army cards.

If all of this means nothing to you, Risky Wars is based on the classic board game Risk, where two or more players take turns attempting to gain complete control over a map of the world. It’s a turn-based strategy game that uses chance to decide the outcome of ‘battles’. This is a slick, well-presented mobile version that’s both fast and challenging to play with multiple difficulty levels and we found ourselves slowly losing a large chunk of the day to it. It’s well worth the asking price, though it should indicate the over-sea paths between continents and we miss having a more conventional board feel to the presentation.

Download this app: Risky Wars for Windows Mobile

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Thumb Voice Notes

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:34:58 GMT

Windows Mobile is an odd fish, it can do so much but by default tries to do so little. An obvious use for your mobile phone is to act as a Dictaphone, it has a microphone, it has storage, so why not? While that gap is filled by some phone suppliers such as HTC, others do not and even the HTC app won’t record while the phone’s screen is off. Thumb Voice Notes tries to fill that gap with what is an easy to use thumb-friendly app.

It’s not going to set the audio world on fire with either its features or looks but it does a good enough job to satisfy everyone. Recording as long as you have storage space and even if the screen is off, at least with our HTC models, people have reported issues with other unlisted models. The file list is easy to navigate and provides simple renaming, deleting and playing. It doesn’t seem possible to change the default recording location which is somewhat bemusing. We’d also like more options to send or share the sound files and perhaps use them as a ringtone. Beyond those it’d also be good to see the waveform and perhaps provide basic cropping to remove unwanted segments.

Buy this app: Voice Thumb Notes for Windows Mobile

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xMaps

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:28:25 GMT

It’s rarely mentioned but beyond the big-boy services from the likes of Google Maps and Bing Maps, there’s an open-source inspired alternative at openstreetmaps.org, which opens up all sorts of possibilities that the closed systems don’t allow. When we say ‘all sorts’ we actually mean downloading maps for your own personal use, also known as ‘offline’ maps. Any map app that provides OpenStreet maps effectively becomes the Google Maps frontend for that system, so you’d expect it to try and mimic as many of its features.

This is where xMaps falls down badly, xMaps isn’t a good mapping app. There’s no multi-touch features at all, so it feels like a last-generation mobile app. This isn’t helped by its use of the standard Windows Mobile sliders and menu that really require a stylus. Besides this there’s no location-aware features, no looking up nearby facilities or even simply searching for place names and so definitely no navigation either. There’s not even any way to manage the downloaded maps by area, so even here it’s somewhat a failure.

Buy this app: xMaps for Windows Mobile

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DroppedBoxx

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:22:09 GMT

We’re not here to sell the dropbox.com service but it’s a simple enough concept. Put a file into the Dropbox folder on your desktop and it’ll be available everywhere you go from your mobile device, except if you use Windows Mobile, that is until now. DroppedBoxx as you may have guessed from the trademark infringement-free name isn’t from Dropbox but a third party, but then you know what happens when you get Mohammed being stubborn about mountains?

As advertised this does indeed bring the Dropbox service to Windows Mobile, it’s not quite as slick as the official app on other platforms in terms of design, but in terms of functionality it’s all here. You can restrict file size syncing, so you won’t unintentionally hammer that data quota by mistake. We also wish it could be a little less hands-on, as in, if we click a file how about just opening it in the appropriate application for us? But if you want to use Dropbox this is a fine way to do it.

Buy this app: DroppedBoxx for Windows Mobile

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SlimPASSWORDS

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:13:25 GMT

The number of passwords, usernames and pin codes we have to remember these days is nuts. Every online service demands its own set and other than resorting to using a security-slack small number of recurring passwords it’s somewhat beyond the capacity of the human mind to memorise all of those separate credentials.

Enter SlimPASSWORDS it’s the usual data-vault app that encases your log-in details in 512-encyption. Of course these details have to be manually entered beforehand but it does offer to generate strong passwords on the fly.

The really clever bit is that SlimPASSWORDS can provide a floating dialogue that will hover over your various apps showing you the relevant username and password, plus any additional notes you like. Any of these can be copied to the pasteboard, so they can be easily pasted into the relevant text box. It provides a good search and category system so it’s easy to look up passwords. It works well but we found the floating dialogue to be somewhat hit and miss, disappearing when we wanted it and not being there when we did.

Download this app: SlimPASSWORDS for Windows Mobile

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TrainTimes

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:08:41 GMT

It’s the perfect application for a phone, looking up and checking your train times is one thing that’s ideally suited to the mobile. So it’s surprising there are so few out there on the Windows platform. We’d guess largely that’s down to the license required to produce any such app. Along with Train Track, TrainTimes is one of those few apps and it shouldn’t have to do too much to put one over its Windows Mobile rival, unfortunately it doesn’t even manage this menial task.

From its stark interface to its basic features TrainTimes does little to inspire, thankfully the things it does get right are an easy to use interface that makes entering stations, times and dates easy and quick. It’ll even remember recent entries for your regular trips. The touch interface works well, if it is a bit twitchy. The issue is beyond live departures, multi-leg journey planning and service updates there’s nothing more here. No fares, no reminders, no favourite trips, no maps. It’ll do the job but we’d expect a whole lot more.

Download this app: TrainTimes for Windows Mobile

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Slider

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:01:35 GMT

With one hundred levels you’d certainly hope that Slider offers a decent amount of entertainment, but either way at 69p it’d be hard to criticise even if it manages to pass just half an hour of grey-matter bending fun. Unlike the alternative Slideout Classic, Slider manages one important thing: getting the difficultly level right.

If anything we’d say it’s a little too easy as we romped through the first twenty levels in mere minutes. It’s also depressingly similar with little to no variation other than the occasional shift from sliding the game piece up rather than across.

There’s also no attempt to take advantage of enhanced screen sizes with the 240-pixel square playing area remaining that size no matter how big your screen is. It’s a shame as a little more effort on the presentation would have helped lift what ends up being a very flat game.

Download this app: Slider for Windows Mobile

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Facebook ContactPic

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:59:15 GMT

While most Android phones will do it for your automatically, the older Windows Mobile platform just stares blankly at social networks like the slow child in class. Thankfully an enterprising developer has stepped in to try and bridge the gap between Facebook and your Windows Mobile phone, promising to easily sync data between the two. And it works, sort of.

As with most Facebook apps you’ll need to give it permission to access your Facebook data. This has to be done via a web browser that will provide a code you enter into the Windows Mobile app. It can then download your Facebook contacts, at this point we were hoping for an almost automatic process. Unfortunately ContactPic doesn’t seem to match contacts, we have to manually pair up all of the listed contacts. With that done, it will download the images and birthdays to the phone’s contact list. If only it would do this part automatically with perhaps a manual check, we’d be far happier with it.

Buy this app: Facebook ContactPic for Windows Mobile

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Power Monitor

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:55:46 GMT

The bane of all smartphones is poor battery life, with so much ‘clever’ going on inside them it’s the battery that takes the hammering. Especially if you’re browsing the web thanks to your unlimited data tariff, or are able to gas all day to friends with an unlimited talk time deal. So monitoring your battery’s power levels does make a lot of sense, which is why the manufacturer’s placed that level-metre right on the main screen. The problem is it’s not particularly accurate and on some phones is just a downright lie.

Power Monitor tries to put entirely accurate power levels in your hand. On that level is does succeed, producing an hour-by-hour report of exactly how much battery life you have left. It can also reboot the phone at a given time and runs silently in the background. It just leaves us wondering what’s the point? If it offered warnings, life-left estimates or the ability to shutoff phone features that might be helpful, but as it stands it’s an expensive passive logging tool.

Buy this app: Power Monitor for Windows Mobile

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Slideout Classic

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:50:58 GMT

We love a good puzzle game as much as then next person but to be entertained the puzzle has to be entertaining. Part of that is playing the win-reward game, if people don’t feel rewarded from trying to complete a task then they’ll just give up in frustration. Get the balance right of rewards for effort and everyone is left happy, even if it was a struggle along the way.

That the big failure of Slideout, it’s a deviously simple puzzle, slide blocks around to release the largest block out of the top. Unfortunately the difficulty level seems to increase exponentially and any variety in puzzles is nonexistent. This combination will probably have you giving up at level three, if not level two. There’s also many reports of problems with it work on the HTC HD2 and it doesn’t like QVGA resolution screen such as on the HTC Touch2, which all adds up to a poor app.

Download this app: Slideout Classic for Windows Mobile

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Currency Conv

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:17:03 GMT

Why would you want to buy a currency conversion app if you can get the same job done for free on-line? It’s a good question but not all of us have the luxury of knowing we’ll have that vital internet connection 24/7. Enter Currency Conv it’s a simple to use app that does exactly what its name suggests.

Providing a list of 72 currencies that covers over 110 countries you have just two entries the input currency and the conversion result. Both have to be selected from a standard Windows Mobile menu and there’s no easy ‘switch’ button, if you suddenly decided to convert currency the other way.

It’s also a shame there’s no way to list multiple currencies of your choice as well.

Annoyingly despite this working offline – it provides details of when the last update occurred – there’s a ‘no network error’ listed every time you try and use it. The currency details are delivered from TimeGenie and there’s no option for changing this source. So if you don’t trust that source you may want to look elsewhere.

Buy this app: Currency Conv for Windows Mobile

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ShopAid

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:12:13 GMT

It always hard to distinguish a good to-do list from a shopping list, in our minds they’re the same but the shopping one can come with a shopping-load of unnecessary baggage. ShopAid is trying to prove us wrong and in many ways it does a reasonable job. Designed with finger-use in mind it’s littered with easy to navigate scrolling menus. You can build multiple shopping lists wit the ability to export and import these so they can be saved and shared.

Creating a list requires you to add items from a list of items, while this is quick to do and it’s easy to search for, sometimes you just want to add in Tea rather than scroll to ‘T’ or type ‘Tea’ into the search just to then add it. Once you have your list you just tick things off. There’s no option to add quantity and sometimes whilst scrolling the display went blank to reappear. So whilst good it’s hard to recommend this over the free Micarrito.

Buy this app: ShopAid

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Marathon

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:00:26 GMT

The App world has generated a small industry in phone-based GPS tracking in the pursuit of the perfect training system. Some like SmartRunner are free, but fund themselves as through a web-site that provides tools to analyse and store your runs. Marathon is an entirely standalone phone-based app designed to store, analyse and generally encourage your training.

As with all these apps it’s based around the GPS in your phone to precisely track your route including speed, location and altitude. Because of that it can provide details of your training time, average speed and calories burnt. As it stores your previous runs locally Marathon adds a cool feature, which is customised spoken announcements, these update you on your current performance: how far you’ve run and how you’re comparing against previous runs, plus many more variations.

If it wasn’t for this, it’d simply be yet-another-training app. Its presentation is lacking but a built-in skin feature may help change that over time and the GPS results can be viewed in Google Maps making it rounded training tool.

Buy this app: Marathon for Windows Mobile

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Proximity: GPS-activated alarm

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:57:10 GMT

How often have you sent a text message or made a phone call to say “I’ll be home in half an hour”? It’s one of those reassuring things, to let your better-half, friends or even business contacts know that you’re on the way.

Based around GPS tracking, this app enables you to enter a destination and then ask it to set-off an alarm, send an email, text or call a contact when you’re a set amount of time away. Proximity tracks your speed and so creates an estimate of how long it’ll take you to reach your destination, if you repeat a trip it’ll even refine this over time.

Creating a trip is based around a search for a town name, so no interactive maps even to check the location, it also throws up US locations and it’s a shame there’s no option to restrict it to at least a country. It does seem to learn the area you’re moving in, to help refine results and stores previous destinations, along with handling multiple legs to a journey.

The big deal-breaker here is if it loses GPS the whole app becomes useless, as there’s no fall back such as using location based on the cell station used.

Buy this app: Proximity: GPS-activated alarm for Windows Mobile

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Goal.com

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:46:06 GMT

If there’s one thing some men like to do more than watch football, it’s talk about football. But to do that you have to know what’s going on in the world of football and that’s where the internet can come in very helpfully.

Goal.com is a free app that’s tries to keep you abreast with the latest football news delivered direct through the internet pipes to your phone. It’s looks to be based on the same engine that the rather slick London Evening News app, which means news articles and images are tailored perfectly for your device’s screen and it’s also suitably configurable.

While we can’t complain about the fact this is free with reasonably unobtrusive adverts, our main beef is with the content itself. While you can opt for various international leagues and languages, of course including the English Premier League, what you can’t do is then opt to follow or highlight a favourite team. The big-four of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea have dedicated feeds, along with breaking news and transfers, beyond that your only option is to add an RSS feed, but in that case you might as well use any-old RSS news reader.

Download this app: Goal.com for Windows Mobile

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Media Remote

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:39:35 GMT

We’ve longed for a good PC remote control and finally Media Remote manages to provide just that. At its heart it’s a solid and usable media player remote. It works by the usual route of providing a PC-based control program that you download and install using a decent installer.

This provides the two-way control between the PC and your phone, enabling you to control: Media Center, WMP, PowerDVD, WinDVD, iTunes, VLC, XBMC and the Windows volume mixer. The presentation is basic but the controls work flawlessly, basic information is also fed back to the phone to display the playing track’s name.

On top of this it doubles as a mouse controlled touchpad, which is clever enough to work alongside the player controls. This aspect is a bit hit and miss as the cursor often jumps around, but not so bad it’s unusable. It’s designed to work via your wireless network or via Bluetooth. If the mouse control was smoothed-out and a bit of polish added to the interface this would be perfect.

Buy this app: MediaRemote for Windows Mobile

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