CE 2.0 PowerToys

For CE 1.0, PowerToys was an essential download. It added cascading menus to supplement the limited CE 1.0 Start menu, and included the Remote Control app to CE, as well as several other less useful applications. PowerToys for CE 2.0 carry across most of these applications, apart from the most useful Remote Control app, and add in a few new tools.

The new applications are Business Cards, Information Today, Mailbox Grepper, DTMF Dialing; the latter two are built in to the Contacts application, and appear in the Tools menu. DTMF Dialing is obvious; you might think that Mailbox Grepper allows you to search your mailboxes, but you'd be wrong. What it actually does is create contact cards for all address found in your InBox, with the Office Location field set to Created by Mailbox Grepper; it will only work properly with SMTP email addresses, as Microsoft Exchange Server addresses are preprocessed by CE Services in such a way as to present the email address differently.

Business Cards seems like a gimmick: it copies details from your own Contact record into the Business Cards application, and lets you associate a GIF logo with it, then exchange this by infrared with any other HPC that also has the Business Cards application installed.

Information Today I quite like: it presents a multitabbed view with tabs for Appointments, Tasks, Alarms, Mail, Contacts and Status. The role of the first three tabs is obvious; the Mail tab shows current items in your InBox, Contacts the standard details (Name, Work Phone, Home Phone and Company) for all records in Contacts, and Status has three dials, one each for Memory, Disk and Battery. Unfortunately the battery level indicator doesn't seem to match that shown in the Power Control Panel, although it could be performing some clever averaging of main and backup battery levels. Double clicking on the details in any of these tabs will launch the appropriate application, although only in a crude way: click on a Contact won't select that record, for example, and clicking on the Battery Meter will only launch the Control Panel, not the Power application.

Old applications that are carried over into the new PowerToys include Cascading Menus, Mute, some Sound Schemes, and Pocket Paint. There is a new sound scheme, the Sci-Fi Sound Scheme, which I tentatively prefer to the default scheme, although it seems to sound much louder. Mute and Cascading Menus will show up in the tray on the task bar. Curiously enough, I get the impression that Cascading Menus is now slower than the Start menu.

If Microsoft could only bring back Remote Control, the one essential application from the original PowerToys, then I'd rate the new PowerToys much more highly. As it is, PowerToys for Windows CE 2.0 is a curiosity, and nothing more.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: June 8, 1998