[General Topics] Menneisyys:
PIEPlus by ReenSoft is, now, probably the best Pocket Internet Explorer / Internet Explorer Mobile plug-in, allowing for a great deal of new functionality (save pages, save links, multiple tabs).

The plug-in is available HERE and costs $14.95. If you're a version 1.x user, you only need to pay half the price for the upgrade. The plug-in is available for all Pocket PC operating systems starting with Pocket PC 2002.

I've frequently reported on the new versions of PIEPlus; the last "real" review was that of the Release Candidate 1 (RC1) (the last but one version released before the final version) here. As there are not many visible changes it (except for some menu restructuring – for example, “Screen Drag” is now in the scroll menu), please refer to it (and the review of version 2.0, also linked from there) for a complete overview of what it's capable of and how it compares to the alternate Pocket Internet Explorer / Internet Explorer Mobile plug-ins, most importantly, MultiIE.

Compared to RC1, there are a lot of welcome bug fixes, most importantly the following:

The previous versions had some bugs with more than two tabs opened – some tabs just inexplicably vanished, the left/right scrolling arrows didn’t appear on the rightmost part of the tab bar etc. Now, the same hasn’t happened to me on any of my test devices. (I’ve throroughly tested this.)

The scrolling behaviour made much more consistent on most WM5 devices. In the following, I elaborate on this subject a bit more.

Scrolling and WM5

As far as scrolling, one of the most neuralgic issues (also see this article) under WM5 & IEM is concerned, I’ve re-run my scrolling tests with the following results (please DO READ THE LINKED ARTICLE so that you understand what these charts are all about!):

Your own settings (“Scroll like IE” disabled):

IE compatible scroll mode (“Scroll like IE” enabled):

That is, the scroll in PIEPlus 2.1 is functioning as expected. On the HTC Universal, I haven’t run into the “unable to set keyboard hook” error message known for many Universal & RC1 users (see for example the comments here), which was already fixed in RC2.

I’ve run the tests not only in the first, but also in the second and third tabs. RC1 had a bug on the Universal and the Wizard that only let these devices override the default scrolling functionality in the first opened tab. Now, the problem is gone.

Note that if you own a Pocket PC with a volume slider you'd like to use as a page up/down scroller, you may want to give a try to SmartSKey . It overrides the default volume setter functionality of the volume slider, making it much more usable. Please read this article for more information on getting and using SmartSKey.

Note that the final version, as with earlier versions (and unlike MultiIE), doesn’t allow for registry-level disabling of the WM5 default (link) scroll behaviour ([HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\ Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ Navigation\4-Way Nav] explained here). This is, however, not a problem, now that scrolling works as expected.

Verdict

Now that the tab and the scrolling problems have all been fixed, I can only recommend the new version. It is REALLY good. Give the trial version a try.