Written by Peter Murphy on Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Review: Spb Wallet 2.0

I have to say, I’ve been using Spb Wallet since version 1.0, and I want to refer you to the review that made me pick up the program in the first place. TJ really pointed out what made the application great in that iteration, and sold me on it. Then when I read Lauren’s head to head, of eWallet and Spb Wallet, I had already upgraded to Spb Wallet 1.5, and have been using it ever since. So any new upgrade is on my radar, when version 2,0 came out, I had my sleeping bag and was waiting on line for my download, virtually.

Of course, Spb Wallet is a very stable, and time tested application, but the tendency to focus on finger friendly, sans stylus, applications has driven many windows mobile developers to upgrade the UI’s they include in updates. most WinMo devices don’t have a large screen, so the finger friendly options become a moot point. Although, they make apps look a whole lot better.

Spb Wallet 2.0 offers a new UI, a bevy of new syncing options, and a more succinct file system, compacting your previous wallet files, let’s go

On installation, Spb wallet 2.0 takes your older, previous .swl files and compresses them, sorry I didn’t capture the installation process and messages, I’ve been a bit pre-occupied with local events.

The conversion process happens on both the desktop and mobile device, and let’s face it, any space we can save is a bonus. It is a no brainer, and a great inclusion to the original application.

From now on I’m going to split this into Mobile, and then Desktop, to best highlight the version updates.

Mobile

The first thing that struck me, was the crispness of the UI, I don’t think it was wishful thinking on my part, but right from the initial Log On screen, I was just impressed, and there was no lag typing in my password at all.

If you have a quick look at the screen shot, you can see the row of buttons across the bottom that bring up a numerical, lower case, upper case and symbol keyboards, which let’s you have any combination of characters and letters for a password to protect your personal info. Once you’ve signed on all of your cards are available. Again I would say the speed improvement is phenomenal, and the new sliding animation transitions between screens are great.

You can store any information you want and you can create any custom card interface you want. It used to be quite a clunky process, with 1.5, but creating new card templates in 2.0 is a breeze. I can only say, this is much more mobile friendly and ram optimised than it used to be.

You can quickly create customised cards on the mobile, with little effort. I appreciate the amount of pre installed templates that come with the application, but there are so many, and some of the intended templates such as the included Software product key template, had way too much redundant/not useful for me information fields included. So above is a template I created, with info added. It was easy and quick, but after I had created the template, and added the info for the first time, it looked like this.

Oops, got a bit of overlap there didn’t I, easy fixed, you can now edit a template directly from the card view. Hit edit in the bottom right corner in card view and you get

to the card editing view, from where you can change to a different template for the card or if you hit the little blue box next to the template drop down menu, will actually take you to edit the template you are actually using.

What’s a really nice inclusion is the fact that you can drag and drop the fields wherever you want them easily fixing your layout mishaps, still maintaining the integrity of the already created card.

As for templates there is now access to an online template library directly from the handheld of over 7000+, if you can’t find one for your needs you can create your own.

DeskTop

Any good productivity application for Windows Mobile should include a desktop client, in my opinion. The beauty of Spb Wallet, is the parity between the desktop application and the handheld/Windows Mobile application. Although they are on different devices, they are so similair, that if you can use one you can use the other.

Any thing you can do on your handheld is easier on a PC, and that’s the winner with this program. As with the rest of the application, it is more compact and faster, less RAM hungry. For me the most significant new feature is over the air syncing, and that applies to the WinMo, Symbian and iPhone versions of Spb Wallet 2.0.

the biggest and newest feature is over the air syncing, and that applies to all versions, but Spb, please tell me where my Gmail Mailbox sync is? I configured it successfully, but I can’t find the cloud version of my wallet on Gmail.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d have to say, this is a great app that has gotten monumentally better, for reasons of optimisation, it is faster and smoother, and adds some great mobile features. This update though, signals Spb’s intention to develop for the three dominant mobile platforms, so you would have to anticipate some little glitches. That’s all I’ve found little glitches, for a cross platform change-up like this, it’s a winner for me