PhoneAlarm (v 1.12.02)
from PocketMax

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Do you have a Pocket PC Phone Edition? If so, you will want to check out phoneAlarm. The programmer has been tweaking and updating the application almost weekly. What’s so good about phoneAlarm? Well… for starters, it gives you a complete display on the today screen of all of the missed calls, voice mail, SMS, E-mail messages! However, that’s not all.

Features:

• Provides repeating alarms and escalating sound on new SMS/Email, missed calls & voice messages
• 7 Custom Phone profiles with manual / time-based automatic switching.
• Alarm notification on weak phone signal
• Battery level / alarm
• Customize sound for each alarm type
• Mute device and phone volume also 1-click mute button
• Customized Skins for the user interface
• Bluetooth & Flight mode control via profiles (also for Widcomm/Broadcomm stack)
• Supports VGA display (skins will be available soon)
• Icons provide direct access to Inbox, missed call history etc.
• Alarm sounds include any sound files in \Windows & \Windows\rings directories
• English & German user interface
• Simple installation

I was initially worried about repeating alarms. One time a few years ago with my iPAQ 3955, I missed an alarm. When I picked up my device, the battery was dead and everything was gone. The alarm just didn’t stop and it drained the battery. However, that isn’t a problem with phoneAlarm. There are built in features to prevent this from happening.

Everything is 100% customizable. Here are some of the best features:

Easy Setup

It’s super easy to setup individual profiles on your device. A profile can be set for Home, Work, Meeting, Night, Loud, Car and Flight mode. Inside each of the profile settings, you can control the both volume controls (including the call volume), the type of alarm sounds, all notifications, radio and Bluetooth settings as well as the brightness of the screen. A new feature allows you to run a particular application when changing to a profile! The best thing about the profiles is you can even set them to change automatically based on the time of day. Let’s say we want the Work Profile to be on during 8am-5pm. After 5pm, we can have it change to the Car or Loud Profile for an hour and then switch to the Home Profile. After 10pm, we can set it to switch to Night Profile and the cycle begins again. In the Night Profile, you can turn off all the settings for the best power saving options. Profiles will allow you to select quiet sounds during the day and louder ones in the evening. All you have to do is change the sound file that is selected within the application. The Flight Profile will automatically turn off the radio on your phone and change any other options you select. By simply changing back to another profile, the radio will be turned back on automatically!

NOTE: You can also select a different Ring Tone for each profile. This will work perfectly as long as you do not have a 3rd Party ring tone application installed (such as the free application PhotoContacts found on pdaPhoneHome or the XDA Developers site).

Repeating alarms

Some people want to hear a tone only once. Some like to hear it until they can pick up the device. Don’t worry, both options are available. You can set the alarms to ring from anything from 1x every 10 seconds to 8x every 15 minutes. This cycle can continue up to 30x or even endless if you wish. The battery protection will kick in with 20% of battery life left. You can adjust that feature as well.

The Today Screen

Well… Microsoft has given us a notification icon when we get messages, but it’s not very specific about the type of message. It’s only a little balloon at the top of the screen. With phoneAlarm installed, you can quickly tell the type of message you have received. One glance and you’ll know immediately. Click the icon and POOF, you’re calling your voice mail, reading your mail, or checking for missed calls. There’s even a button to turn on/off the Bluetooth devices. Pressing the Profile button will allow you to mute everything if you wish. If you want a single button to press to mute, that feature is available in the alarm setting screen. You can setup any button to mute your phone or even the microphone.

Default Skin

Full Skin

Mini Skin

Skin Text

Joel’s Blue Skin

Joel’s Black Skin

John's Donut Skin (created by me!)

Skins

Several skins are built in to the system. Some people like a simple look to their devices. Some prefer a more informative screen. PocketMax thought of you. You can even create your own custom icons and skins for phoneAlarm. The winner of the March 2005 contest has his skin posted as well. Joel created a blue skin with boxes and text. It’s easily the most informative skin available. If you don’t like the color blue, Joel even created a black one. It can be downloaded as a CAB file and installed after phoneAlarm has been installed.

The application sells for $15.95 USD and is well worth the price. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve not noticed I have a message by looking at the standard today screen. The balloon icon sometimes doesn’t show correctly. Another notification may have appeared and replaced it. With phoneAlarm, I never miss a thing. The one touch response is incredible. The buttons are big enough to hit while I’m driving.

The programmer is open to suggestions and will often try to incorporate new features based on users suggestions. Over the past few revisions, the programmer (Bruce) has tweaked this application into a powerhouse of features. After version 1.04, you can now upgrade without uninstalling the previous version. This is a fantastic feature since you’ve made all these special changes to your profiles. Bruce has been working very closely with the beta testers on pdaPhoneHome and tweaking the application for the variety of phone providers that exist out there. It is truly amazing, seeing what he has been able to accomplish.

Originally I thought there was a drawback regarding the fact that all six icons appear on the today screen, even if you don’t use them. Personally, I don’t use Bluetooth, but the icon is there all the time. I also don’t use ActiveSync for my mail either. But after learning how to create my own skins, I found that it's really simple to add or remove any icon that you don't want or need!
The .SKN file is a text-based file that can be edited with Notepad. For each icon, you have an entry that gives it's graphic filename, text attributes and it's location for each. You can also tell it whether or not to display any given icon.

A single quotation mark at the beginning of the image line
prevents that image from displaying.

Notice in my example above, inserting a single quotation mark before the image line will cause the icon not to be displayed. In this example, you can have the email icon displayed instead of the Bluetooth icon. If you wish to create a 2nd skin that can flip between the both, just copy all the files, rename the folder and .SKN file, then edit the file to show the icons you desire. The .SKN file gives you all the information you need in order to create your own skin.

You can change the color of the text on the today screen as well. I find I like the black skin created by Joel with yellow numbers, however the signal strength numbers are also yellow on my golden theme. It’s a bit difficult to see at times. It’s not a factor with the other skins since the background is transparent. I would just select a different color for my text.

Great information provided:

Another great feature of phoneAlarm is the information it can provide. As you can see from the image below, by clicking on the SIGNAL icon, it displays the network provider, signal strength, time used today and the total minutes used for the month. In the setting options, you can even set the first day of your billing cycle to keep track! And yes, it does ‘round up’ just like the phone company! It cannot determine which of those calls are actually billable, but it’s a total use of the phone for the month.

Regarding the signal strength information:

The application was originally designed to work with GSM devices. With CDMA devices (like the Verizon system), the signal strength may show as zero. This feature has been greatly improved since the earlier versions.
On some devices it works perfectly, others might work 50% of the time, others may not work at all, however you can always download the trial and check it out for yourself. One important note… you will be prompted to perform a soft-reset after installing the application. Be sure you do that, because if you don't, the application might not work properly.

Kill Data

An additional feature now available it the Kill Data icon. I included it in the Donut skin. Tapping that icon will automatically disconnect the device from your data connection. For those of you with XV6600 or similar device, this will be a welcome addition. Previously, to kill the data connection, it required holding down the End hardware button for more than 5 seconds on the XV6600, which was a pain. Now it's as easy as tapping the Kill Data icon!
Note that to connect to your data connection, you will still have to use the normal methods of connecting, such as opening PIE & surfing, checking email or any other app that will begin the connection for you.

Conclusion

A 30 day trial is available for download. If you have a Phone Edition, give it a try. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the additional information that’s available at your fingertips. Purchase the application for only $15.95 USD.

phoneAlarm is compatible with Pocket PC 2002, 2003 and 2003SE versions. The amount of RAM it requires is very small. It takes only 240K of RAM in the program files folder (that includes all of the available skins), so be sure to install it to the main memory. It does add a few other files to the windows directory as well. The download file is only about 300KB in size.

Future updates will include the ability to use additional 3rd party mail applications. One future addition will be the automatic speakerphone activation. That sounds like a great idea! I can’t wait to see what’s next!

Special thanks to Bruce for sending a full version of phoneAlarm for us to test and review.
Initial review was based on version 1.06.02, but this review has been modified to include features found in version 1.12.02, and will be updated as necessary.
This application was tested using the Verizon XV6600 Pocket PC Phone Edition (CDMA device) running Windows Mobile 2003SE.

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