Price:	$14.95 (pre-release)		Reviewed by:	Neil Brown
Supplied:	Softick		Review date:	22/06/2005
Pros:	Incredibly useful Small footprint Unobtrusive, but easy to access Almost as fast as a dedicated card reader		Cons:	Drivers needed for Windows98 (not Softick's fault!) Does not support the ROM-storage on all devices

Introduction There are times when you come across an application which is just so useful and functional that you have to think to yourself why it has not been on the market before. These times, admittedly, are becoming few and far between- how often do you come across something which is genuinely novel for the OS in question but which will be of benefit to almost every user of platform? Well, when I first heard that Softick had rewritten their Card Export II application for the WindowsMobile platform, I had that feeling once again- although still in “beta”, I would be hard pressed not to recommend this application to everyone with a PDA. The T5 was the first PDA which could do it natively, and the LifeDrive (currently palmOne’s flagship model) is also able to do it. USB pens do nothing else, and they are as ubiquitous today as the floppy disk was five years ago. Simply put, they plug into a USB port, and allow you to access internal ROM (filestores etc), and external cards (SD and CF, mainly), so that you can read files, copy files, and generally act as if your PDA were a drive on your PC. “Nothing new with this!”, I hear you cry – and, in part, you are right. Softick released Card Export for PalmOS several years back, and, more recently, Card Export II for PalmOS- so the concept has been around for PDAs for some time. Also, you are able to browse your storage cards via the “Explore” option in ActiveSync. So what is this idiot raving about?   Well, look at a USB pen – what is so great about it? Firstly, they are small; so much smaller than your PDA. And, secondly, unless you happen to be using Windows 98, you just plug the pen into a USB port, and watch it mount as an HDD- no drivers are necessary. Now, I’ve said that the USB pen is small, and, I am correct- they generally are. But how much smaller would they be if you didn’t actually have to carry one at all? If you have a reasonably roomy external card in your PDA, or, like me, 20+mb of untapped ROM filestore, you can now mount this as an HDD, doing away with the little memory stick completely. Exploring via ActiveSync is also fine – but, not everyone has ActiveSync installed on their PC, or wants to install it just to let you grab a copy of their updated report. It is far simpler (and, in a way, more polite) to be able to plug your PDA into a spare port, copy across the information you want, leaving their system in the state in which you found it. True, if your colleague’s PC is running Windows 98, drivers are required, and so the operation is not quite so clean- you will need to wait until your colleague has come back from hunting dinosaurs and drawing up blueprints for the wheel before you can use this application. I decided to see just how fast Card Export II works, and copy a 106mb file to non-high speed 512mb SanDisk SD card via ActiveSync, then via Card Export II, and finally via a dedicated (ultra-cheap) card reader. The results are shown in the graph below- Card Export II was about 30 seconds slower than the card reader but was an impressive twice the speed of ActiveSync- confirming my belief that Card Export II allows you to use your PDA with ease as a flash drive, even for reasonably large file transfers.   But let’s take a step back for a minute- yes, I think that Card Export II is a great application, and, yes, after having installed it on my PDA for less than five minutes, I’d decided that it was there to stay, but, what exactly do you get for your money? A fancy GUI, flash icons and a bone-crunching heavy metal soundtrack accompanying your files transfers? No. You get a simple text-based menu, which is triggered by an icon (okay, so you do get an icon) which sits next to the connectivity symbols in the bottom right of your Today screen’s lower bar. The icon reloads after a soft reset, so you don't even need to re-run the application manually; just tap it, and select whether you want to ActiveSync, or move into Card Export mode.   The default position is, quite rightly, I feel, left with ActiveSync- for the vast majority of usage, I pick up my PDA, use it / take it with me, and then drop it back in the cradle afterwards, to synchronise any altered or entered data, and would rather resent having to manually select ActiveSync every time. Changing to Card Export mode, however, is as simple as bringing up the menu (one tap), and then selecting Card Export (one tap) – PDA to USB pen in two taps of your stylus. There are a few options which you can set, relating to which card mounts first (SD, CF, or, if present, ROM storage), and how many cards you want to mount. I set this to two, mounting SD first (as my CF data remains virtually unchanged, crammed full as it is with the WikiPedia), and then the CF. In time, I am pretty sure that I will change it to just mount the SD card, as that is the only one I use.   In the version I tested, I wasn’t able to mount the LOOXstore, which is a shame, as it would have given me around 20mb of extra “transfer” space. However, Softick’s website clerly shows that the LOOXStore is not supported, and so it came as no surprise. Something for a future version, perhaps, although this does bring me on to a very important point. During the course of the week in which I have been using this software, I didn’t notice a misspelled word, menus which lead no-where, or functions which had no effect; in effect, the application behaved and performed very well indeed. It remains, however, that this is still in beta state, and so bugs may show their heads now and again. Whilst I am normally against charging for beta software, I feel differently here- for $15, you get a very stable beta, and the opportunity to help develop it further. I cannot guarantee that the price will increase once the PR is issued, but, I think that $15 is very reasonable anyway – if you feel differently, then I’d suggest downloading the trial version (good for 21 days on non-crippled usage), and let you form your own opinion. The same suggestions apply when running any beta software- back up everything before installation, and be prepared for resets- and, if something does go amiss, take a note of it, and forward this to the Softick.   Conclusion My LOOX can now do something that it couldn’t do before. Actually, I want to make that a bit stronger- my LOOX can now so something VERY USEFUL that it couldn’t do before. If you carry a USB pen as well as your PDA, this application may well make you think about this- I mean, do you really need that USB pen? If you are running Windows 98, then this application might have less gloss, because of the need for extra drivers, but this is not Softick’s fault- and, anyway, you’d need extra drivers for any USB pen. At $15, you get an application which is most likely to remain on your PDA, and become one of the first tools to reinstall when you hard reset. Softick have truly hit the mark with this application, and I really can’t find a trowel large enough to heap on the praise it deserves. It isn’t bloated, it has no annoying beeps, and just performs without any fuss. It is in beta state, and there might be a few bugs – but, I have a feeling that this could be a killer application for WM PDAs. Edit: It has been brought to my attention that WindowsMobile 5.0 (the next iteration of the WindowsMobile OS) will include this ability natively- whether this means you want to wait a few months, and definitely upgrade to 5.0, or just buy the application now is obviously a personal choice.