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Wednesday, October 15, 2008
When Handmark first suggested I take a look at PocketExpress, I was hesitant. I asked them, why? Handmark’s answer was persuading enough for me to at least try the free download.
Pocket Express for the iPhone is a watering hole of information ranging from news, sports, weather, financial, entertainment, movies, travel, horoscope, and 24/7 customer service. Taping on your topic of choice brings up a selection of articles or choices.
The first thing I tried out was the weather. Having used all the weather applications for the iPhone, I was curious how PocketExpress stacked up to them. Like Apple’s app, Cupertino is the default location. Sweet, huh? 
Adding your location is as easy as letting the phone use its GPS to do so! You can also type in your address as I did for other spots I like monitoring. This is where problems occurred. When I tried to add Kaiserslautern, Germany (my birth-town), and Incline Village, Nevada (my favorite summer getaway), neither could be found. I ran into this problem for other popular suburban areas and was surprised since even the Apple Weather application found these locations no problem. It looks like Handmark is using weather stations and if a station does not exist in your desired location, you get a big fat Location Not Found. To test this theory out, I added my small town of 900 by hand and it failed. Using the GPS locator worked. When I looked what it attached me to, it was a large city 20 miles north of me.
That aside, the weather section is really nice. It displays a nice two day forecast in sections of day with a large area on the upper most of the screen with current conditions. The bottom contains two locations and a More button for other locations and settings. Truly, the weather section is filled with information that the Apple or even Weather Bug applications don’t offer. Within a few minutes of use of just the weather feature made me want to keep PocketExpress on my iPhone!
I checked out the news next and was again surprised how good it was. The articles were interesting and current. The sports section, too, had great articles as well lending me some insight on my favorite NFL team, the Steelers. Speaking of favorites, you can track your favorite teams (or teams in your division as I did) to get a quick glimpse of scores. MLB is the only other sport you can currently track, but Handmark told SvenOnTech that NHL should hopefully be coming soon.
News, Entertainment, and Finance all present a list of current articles that you can tap to view the full article. Each article is presented in a nice fashion with a thumbnail picture next to the headline. It is very clean and pleasing looking. I found the articles to be very complete and yet short enough that I didn’t find myself wasting away valuable time.
The Movies section, like Weather, will find local theaters using the GPS function. It then lists all near by movie outlets. You check off which ones you frequent or select them all. After that’s done, you tap the movie theater and up comes the listings. Tap on a movie and you’ll find a four star review, genre, cast, director, writer, producer, distributor, website, release date, as well as a synopsis. If the theater supports the option, you can even purchase tickets online. The movie section also gives information about each theater including address and phone number. Like all things iPhone, you can tap on the address to send it to Google Maps or tap the phone number to give the theater a call. Nice.
Horoscope gives you a Birthday section and sections for various signs. Each sign will have a short horoscope for the day.
Travel launches a web app but should be included locally into PocketExpress soon. Assist is for questions and support using the application.
A nice thing PocketExpress does is remember where you last were. So if I had the weather section open and I go to another program and come back to PocketExpress later, there’s the weather. If sports scores was last looked at, it’ll come back when I next open PocketExpress. I like that a lot.
Overall, PocketExpress offers a lot of nice features in one place. Since it is free, it is ad driven, but the ads are desecrate and not in the way. No word if a Pro version is coming but, again, it’s a great application for the price.
November 8th, 2008 at 15:07
Your thoughts on Pocket Express Elite?
Market news & portfolio, 411 search, mobile cierge personal assistant, news of the weird and maps were unavailable on iphone so I returned the 3G after 30 days. The other reasons are no Nuance VoiceControl, VolumeCare, Audacity, PDANet or SlingBox. I lust after the 3G screen, but love these applications on my Treo 755P