Review: PocketDay Personal / Professional Part II

pocketday1.jpgPocketDay Personal / Professional
Version: 4.25
Rating: (Pending Complete Review) Stay Tuned
Link: www.pocketday.com
OTA Link: www.pocketday.com/ota.htm
Desktop: www.pocketday.com/downloads.htm
Cost: $19.95 (Personal) / $34.95 (Professional)
Compatibility: all color BlackBerry devices with OS version 4.0 and higher

Today we will cover the added features found in the Professional version of PocketDay. Namely the World Clock, RSS/News reader, and the Currency Converter. (If you did not catch part I of the review click on this link). Read below for the second part of the review on the added features.

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World Clock: The world clock feature is quite a nice piece of functionality. You can have up to 4 different timezones showing up in this area of the today screen. The time zone selections are quite thorough and I am sure you will be able to find the ones you want in there, they even have Fiji. You also have the option to see the clock in analog or digital format but I find the digital format a tad small for my taste. There is an option to change the text size for all text in PocketDay but not for just the clock. I also enjoyed the nice addition of the date on top of each clock since I have gotten confused quite a few times based on different days in different timezones.

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RSS / News Viewer: The RSS reader built into the Pro version of PocketDay is not really up to industry average. You can see above that it integrates nicely into the PocketDay today screen. They do have the option of how many posts should show on the homepage. The thing that really struck me is that they do not have a way to strip out HTML from the RSS feed or show rich text. When you open up the Engadget feed for example,which you can see in the second screenshot above, you will be forced to view all of the HTML of the post which makes the post almost unreadable. Thought I am proud to say that the BerryReview RSS feed is free of HTML but even so the PocketDay RSS reader does not show images. You do have the option to open the RSS feed in the browser and use RIM’s browser RSS reader but I find that defeats the purpose of the one in PocketDay. In each article you have the option to open the article in the browser or send a link of the article to a friend. I did not find an option to save the article as I have seen in other readers.

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The configuration of the RSS feeds in PocketDay is a bit cumbersome. As you can see above they do have a menu option to add a RSS feed from a list but when I click it nothing happens. I did find that I can choose to add a custom RSS feed but then I need to know the direct URL for the RSS feed, redirects of the feed do not work. The nice part is that the reader does offer you functionality I have not seen elsewhere. They let you set on a feed by feed basis how often you want it to update. They also give you a secondary option to set it to update at a specific time every day. They also give you the option to set how many of the posts are shown on the today page and if the feed is shown on the today page at all. Another nice feature is the ability to sort your RSS feeds in a specific order and also set them up in categories. All in all I think the RSS is a added bonus but I would not purchase the Pro version just for RSS support.

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Currency Converter: This is the best currency converter that I have ever seen on a BlackBerry. I would definitely recommend the Pro version to anybody who travels just for this feature. The currency converter includes every currency I have ever heard of and many I have not. Who has ever heard of the Tanzanian Shilling? The beauty of this application is that you select the currencies you wish to convert and then you enter the amount and select the menu button “Get Current Rate” and there you have the conversion. My only question would be for the financial savvy readers to confirm that the rates are correct since I know there are different sell and buy rates including a median rate.

Conclusion: I find the world clock and the currency converters to be perfect reasons to upgrade to the Pro version. My only hesitation is the RSS reader that I found could have been better rounded out. I am sure the developers at PocketDay will read this review and start working on a new version of the RSS reader to better compete with what the competition is giving out for free. Stay tuned for the final chapter of this lengthy review where we will cover the major strong point of PocketDay. We will cover just how amazingly configurable this software can be and why that can either be a good and bad part of the software.

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