[General Topics] Menneisyys:
After I’ve published the Roundup of All Pocket PC Image Viewers and Editors, Resco has been silent for over 1.5 years and haven’t come up with a new version of their excellent image viewer (and a bit barebone editor), Resco Photo Viewer. Up until now, that is – they have just released the latest version of their flagship image viewer.

Availability, compatibility

The viewer is available here. It’s compatible with all Pocket PC’s starting with PPC 2002. (Note that the homepage only promises WM2003+ compatibility. This is not the case – it’s also compatible with earlier Pocket PC 2002 devices and runs just great on my 5-year-old Compaq iPAQ 3660).

It also has MS Smartphone / Symbian S60, UIQ and Palm OS versions. I’ve also checked out the latter on my Palm Tungsten T3. It also ran flawlessly and was able to zoom into 10 Mpixel images without getting pixelizated. Excellent results!

The price of the title is $24.95; you get the new version for free if you purchased the title in the last 12 months and with a 50% rebate if you’ve a customer of a previous version but purchased it before the last year. Also, if you purchase the title, you get a $5 rebate for Resco Explorer 2005, Resco Radio and Resco Audio Recorder – all top-level, highly recommended applications (see for example the Audio Recorder Bible on why I consider Resco Audio Recorder the best Pocket PC sound recorder application).

What’s new?

Regarding the Roundup (please see this article for Resco 5.31-specific info), they have fixed almost all the problems / shortcomings I’ve listed in there:

It has no longer problems in fully zooming into high-resolution photos. This means it can effectively make use of the RAM memory of devices that have plenty of them. For example, I had no problems with fully zooming into 10 Mpixel images (for example this one; this screenshot also shows this) on my 128M RAM-equipped WM2003SE VGA Pocket Loox 720. While zooming into this image, the RAM usage was around 40 Mbytes, which does also show it did zoom into the image. Also note the new zoom icons – now, it’s far easier to change the zoom percentage.

It supports the video output capabilities (see this article for more info) 2700G MPU in the Dell Axim x50v / x51v. This is also a very welcome addition and great news for all x50v / x51v users.

It supports both manual (hardware button-based) zoom in/out and scrolling around in an image. This has been missing from all the other image viewers.

It has wallpaper setting capabilities – with transparency setting. The latter is painfully missing from most (simple) Today wallpaper setter applications.

It allows for directly exporting a given image to the system-level Contacts database.

It supports WM5 softkeys.

The program has undergone a generic facelift; all icons have been changed and made much prettier.

Also see THIS for more info on the changes.

What hasn’t changed (much)?

The screen capture module (please see this full roundup of all Pocket PC-based solutions to see how Resco’s solution compares to the alternatives) hasn’t changed much as can be seen in here – there is a new Settings button, which makes it easier to set the image target and type paramers. (For comparison, the main dialog of version 5.32 can be seen in here). This means, unfortunately, there’re no radically new additions to this module.

The editing functionality of the application isn’t at all extended; the same stands for the (still) non-existing batch editing / conversions. This is not a big problem though.

Verdict

The best Pocket PC-based image viewer just got better. While it’s still lacking some (advanced, “geeky”) functionality, you won’t find better / faster generic-use photo / image viewers for the Pocket PC. Don’t forget to check it out, particularly if you’re already an owner of a previous version and are, therefore, eligible for free / rebated upgrade.