Interface: Well the first thing that strikes you about the Empower application is that unlike the BlackBerrySmart Email Viewer it provides you the HTML email experience within the native BlackBerry email client. As you can see above the only thing it changes is the portion of the screen where the email text is. The rest of the native email application is left intact. While the BlackBerrySmart Email Viewer replaces the native email client the Empower application trys to integrate alongside the native client. As you will see later this has both good and bad.

I ran into quite a few issues with the Email Viewer that may explain why it is still in Beta. First of all the client seems to choke with emails that have many images in them. It will start showing you the HTML interface and then when you scroll down it will automatically exit the HTML view. If you try and click the menu option to toggle the HTML view back you will be taken back to the top of the email and have to start over. The problem is that you sometimes have to do this multiple times until you finally see the email. I tried turning off the option to see images in the HTML hoping that the images were the issue but that did not help. Hopefully this reliability will be fixed in the next release. Another nice feature is that when you reply to an email the viewer still retains the HTML in the original message at the bottom of the reply screen as you can see below. If you exit the reply screen and discard the message the viewer also remembers where you were in the email you replied to.

EDIT: I was also informed (thanks to maximax from BBF) that the Viewer also supports foreign characters such as Chinese. Since I do not receive Chinese emails (other than spam) I cannot confirm this fact.

Hotkeys: This part of the HTML viewer confused me a little bit. Most of the hotkeys seem to work. Hitting R to reply, F to forward, P to go to the next unopened email, S to search, K to go to the newest message in the thread all seem to work. On the other hand hitting spacebar to go down in the email, hitting B to go to the bottom of the email, or T to go to the top of the email does not work. There does not seem to be a hotkey for turning the viewer on and off. You have to go into the menu and hit toggle HTML/text viewer.

Pros:

• HTML viewer is integrated tightly into the native email client
• Ability to both use the viewer as the default client or on a per email basis
• Clean integration when you reply to an email
• Easy install process
• Free for now!

Cons:

• Unreliable when it comes to large emails with many images
• Removes some common hotkeys from your email client
• Does not work on all emails
• No preview of text in the configuration

Conclusion: I find Empower is not ripe yet for setting it as my default viewer. The guys over at Empower seem to have a real gem on their hands, especially if they plan on offering this functionality for free. The program must be made stable enough so that it does not lower the reliability of the native email client. The hotkey issues will hopefully be fixed in a later release and we will keep you up to date when the updates do occur. As of now I would recommend that you install and try the application. The images in email function may not be ready for prime time yet but it does add some much needed functionality to your BlackBerry.

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