The news that QuickLaunch was making its way to the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and BlackBerry Bold was great news for me because the one part of the BlackBerry OS that can be cumbersome is program navigation (IT HAS JUST BEEN RELEASED FOR THE CURVE AND BOLD). The trackball system works well and the OS is super quick, but once you have a few applications installed things start to become confused.
QuickLaunch is designed to offer almost immediate access to your most often used applications and system settings and there are many factors that need to be considered to make something like this work more efficiently than the standard OS. It would appear that NikkiSoft has managed to succeed in every area.
First up, quick access to the launch pad is essential and this has been managed by simply allocating one of the side-mounted shortcut keys to the application. You can choose the left or right key and also have the launch system appear on the left or right hand side of the screen- I suspect right handed people will go with the left and vice versa, but at least the choices are offered.
Next you need to be able to add shortcuts to everything you require quick access to. When you first look, it appears that there are not many options, but the ability to universally select an application works well. It needs to be running to add a shortcut, but I could not find any applications that did not work perfectly. Web pages, email addresses, music files, videos, phone numbers, games, applications, connectivity settings are all accessible via QuickLaunch and thus you will be hard pushed to find something on a BlackBerry device that cannot be launched by the application.
The ability to add separators is about the only nod towards customisation and that makes sense because QuickLaunch automatically follows the colour scheme of the current theme and could not really look any more suited to the BlackBerry interface. You can choose between regular and large fonts and you can also move items up and down, but that’s your lot. Application launching has proved to be as quick, from a processor point of view, as the standard interface and I can now get to a wider variety of applications and functions straight from the front screen. The real bonus is that I can open QuickLaunch no matter what screen I am on and this is the biggest time saver of all.
I had a concern that it would use memory, but even that worry has been beaten down- “QuickLaunch does not hog resources; it runs only when it’s opened. You can make your selections quickly and then QuickLaunch exits until you run it again.”
QuickLaunch is like the BlackBerry operating system itself- super fast, elegant and it simply gets the job done. I could write superlatives all day about this application because it appears to have no faults at all, and the care that has been taken to create a beautifully presented and genuinely useful application is worthy of the platitudes already bestowed upon it.
Mobile applications as good as QuickLaunch appear once a year, if we are lucky, and for under $5 it is one you should not miss out on!
Available now for the Curve 8900, Bold and Storm for $4.99. (20% off today only using discount code ‘snow’)
