My experience with Spb Pocket Plus

Two weeks ago I downloaded and installed Spb Pocket Plus to my T-Mobile Wing running Windows Mobile 6.0. Spb Pocket Plus includes an amazing number of enhancements to the Windows user interface, including:

• a tabbed icon interface for the today page
• a much improved battery indicator
• touch-scrolling in Internet Explorer, Contacts, and a few other applications
• tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer
• very nice widgets for displaying battery status, memory, storage, etc.
• 'plugins' for Windows Media Player, messaging, and more
• additional customizable behavior for the hardware buttons - for example, you can add functions for press/hold on each of the buttons.
  

In all, this is a major improvement to the user interface experience. The today layout is completely customizable: you can select which tabs to show, where they should be displayed (top or side), their size, etc. You can add additional tabs. You can add applications to any tab, and drag/drop applications between tabs.

The tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer is a very handy feature, especially on the (relatively) slow GPRS/Edge network from T-Mobile. You can open tabs in the background while continuing to read the current tabbed page.

Touch scrolling is something else I've wanted for quite a while - ever since seeing the first iPhone. The Spb Pocket Plus implementation is intuitive and easy to use.

Sadly, I had to uninstall this from my phone after about 10 days. It was simply too unstable. I found that I needed to reboot the phone every day because it was out (or nearly out) of memory. Usually the first symptom was that touch scrolling would become erratic, then stop working altogether. Once, the phone would not reboot and I had to use the 'safe mode' thoughtfully provided by Spb. After 2 reboots in safe mode I was finally able to boot in normal mode. Then the next day the phone locked up. I had to hard-reset it, and when it rebooted, all the Spb tabs were gone! After about 15 minutes of trying to recreate them (using the easy-to-use configuration provided by Spb), I decided that it simply wasn't worth it.

I think Spb has an amazing set of products, and it's likely that Spb Pocket Plus works better on other phones. But for me, now, it's just not usable. Your mileage may vary.