I am a rather dull guy when it comes to picking a color scheme with which to read my emails, so I chose a white background and black text.
Advanced Options gives you choices such as whether to automatically use Empower to open all, none, or only certain messages (email, PIN, and sent being the selections). Other options here are self explanatory, with the exception of URL parsing, which can be explained best by the Empower Staff: “New Option: Added an option under Advanced options to set Strict/Lenient URL Parsing. Leniant parsing of urls allows { } etc in the urls which are “technically” disallowed.”
I am not a Pocket Day user, so I cannot attest to its integration ability with Empower.
Image Display Options gives you very usable options for how Empower handles images. This will come in particularly handy for those of you without unlimited data plans.
Finally, options for Task and Calendar Integration are present should you want to change how these features behave. I found that the out-of-the-box settings worked just fine for me.
So enough jibber jabber, let’s see some emails. First up is a friendly Mother’s Day reminder from my Dad, strictly text. As you can see, the look is familiar, but also more compact.
Next we have my Zune Spring Update. Yes folks, I use a Zune – my email is listed at the end of this review and I will try hard to respond in a timely manner to the impending iFlames.
As images load, they appear in real-time while others load in sequence. A small image placeholder with the familiar data-transfer arrows lets us know that the images are being fetched.
Beautiful. An accurate representation of what the original email looks like, with full image and link support. Images that are wider than your screen’s resolution are automatically resized to fit, keeping the aspect ratio.
Let’s look at this large-image handling once more, just for effect. The following email contains the same image in three increasing sizes:
The above image, at 800 pixels wide, was automatically resized to fit on my 8300′s screen – very cool.
Being the democratic program that it is, Empower always gives you the option to view an email in the way it would appear without Empower installed, using the “Toggle HTML/Text” option. I am not sure why one would do such a thing, but it’s nice to know that Empower’s team opted not to exercise dictatorial power. One minor issue that I noticed on my device is that the in-Email menu was a bit laggy – moving up and down resulted in some delays before the blue bar caught up to my trackball movement. Not a big deal though.
Now let’s try out the Calendar Integration. Going back to my Dad’s email, I want to set a reminder. Seamless, fast – recurring themes with Empower. Emails with attachments present no problems, either. Email integration with Viigo and the built-in Blackberry Browser works just as seamlessly.
Should you choose not to load images automatically, Empower makes it very easy to load them on-demand.
One problem I did find is that hyperlink images in emails are active. So, if you get an email in which an image is a link to an internet site, you will not be able to click on the image and open the link on your Blackberry.
Overall, Empower provides a seamless solution to reading emails the way they were supposed to look. BBSmart better have some tricks up its sleeves to match or surpass this experience.
