Review: PhotoDial
In general, when users refer to their Treo smartphone they speak of the Palm/PDA aspect and of the ‘phone’ aspect. The reason for this is probably because the phone has always been separate-invoked by pressing the leftmost phone button. The developers at Electric Pocket have found a way to unite the two with their new application PhotoDial. With PhotoDial, you can add photo speed dial options within the launcher screen of the Treo 650.
Initial Impressions
PhotoDial is so simplistic in its approach that, on first glance, itâ??s hard to immediately see how useful it is. It allows you to create a speed dial shortcut in your launcher, which you can then select and automatically dial the individual. A photo or icon of your choice becomes the shown icon in the launcher page. If used for all your speeddial entries, you could conceivably never have to ‘leave’ the pda portion of your Treo by hitting the phone button.
The Pros
I am one of the many Treo owners that use a third-party launcher, and was impressed to find that Photodial works with both Zlauncher and Hi-Launcher. In fact, the icons created with PhotoDial become ‘real applications‘ which you can map to buttons. When you create a Photodial contact from your address book it also defaults in the contact photo if you already have one in your address book. You may then select or take another picture or one of several icons provided. Once I installed PhotoDial, it created a dedicated category in the launcher screen and all entries were automatically saved to that category. This was a very intuitive feature and worked well.
The Cons
There were two details that I noticed while using PhotoDial. The first is that the program does not give you an option to edit an entry. To make any modifications, such as change the related photo, you need to delete the entry and create a new one. The lack of this option also makes it difficult to check whether you listed your sister’s work number, cell number or home number in her entry, therefore correct initial setup is very important.
The other issue is one of space consumption. While the program itself is relatively small, each shortcut is about 11kb. So, depending on your volume you may end up with a substantial amount of usage. Unless you plan to convert all of your address book entries into shortcuts, this should not be too much of an issue.
Overall
ElectricPocket definitely has a winner in PhotoDial which will help users make their launcher even more useful. Itâ??s well thought out and easy to set up. Hopefully, future releases will work on making it possible to edit entries.
PhotoDial retails for $9.95 and is available as a free trial.
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