Inesoft Phone 4 Review

The Inesoft Phone 4 (formerly Inesoft Address Book) suite of tools bring some attractive skins/features to your WinMo phone functions, however you can get most of these items free from XDA developers (in one form or another). Many newer phones come with a superior touch dialer UI, etc. If you have an older phone, Phone 4 could certainly give it a shot in the arm in the usability department.

Install
Installing Inesoft went okay, except the language-chooser splash wouldn't exit unless I used the close button at the top of the window (instead of OK). Maybe that was by design? Who knows, but the vendor sent me a trial cab, which you can download here. If you feel better using the standard desktop installer, you can choose that method instead. The cab file is about 2.2M in size. After installing the cab (use file explorer to navigate to, and single-tap the file), a plug-in will appear on your Today screen. You can launch any of the bundled utilities from the Today plug-in. I tested this app on 2 WinMo devices. One QVGA, non-phone device (because it's easy for me to grab screens on my iPAQ), and on an i-mate VGA phone (to really test the phone-specific features), both running WM 6.  It performed well on both, and I had no major issues. My specific gripes are that Inesoft relies heavily on scrollbars in the contact app, and many features can only be used via traditional soft-menus which require the stylus. I would have liked to see a separate, threaded SMS application included for $29.95. Still, it packs some handy enhancements.

Today plug-in

The P4 Today plug-in furnishes your WinMo home screen with shortcuts to most common phone-related tasks. The default skin is a typical “touchflow-like” glossy black that will go well with dark themes. To set the base hue for the title bar and soft keys to black, you can edit the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Color\BaseHue to 0 (DWORD value), but I use a great tool called UI tweaker, which makes changing WinMo system colors a cinch.  There are also additional skins here for P4. Along the top row of the plug-in are the following buttons: phone history; dialer; favorites (application for creating contact shortcuts); and options (just about every phone setting). The bottom buttons: Mute; Profile; and Profiler options (vibrate, BT headset, etc.). I think I would have taken off the options, and added a Contacts button instead. Maybe reduced the size of the  profile button on the second line and added options there, but anyway, you can get to Contacts quickly through the main dialer application.

Dialer

The dialer offers large button access to voice or SMS communication. The P4 dialer remapped my i-mates' hard button for initiating a call, so it was quickly accessible without fiddling with the Today home screen. It incorporates T-9 dial-filtering so that a few key presses of the  keypad will start indicating contact hits across the top of the screen in the navigation ribbon. The filtering will even key off of notes that you added to your contact fields. If you are like me and too lazy to associate images with your contacts, the contact name will appear instead. You can also get to various menus (history, contacts, favorites, and options) in the same navigation strip, which is the default view before you start punching in numbers. The P4 tools do a fine job of keeping you away from the Windows Start and Programs menu. Every application in the suite has quick buttons and integration to allow you to navigate to the other P4 tools, and sliding gestures are incorporated nicely, which puzzles me why they decided to keep the scrollbars? If you use the built-in exit buttons (which are overlarge as well), the apps actually exit, meaning they aren't still running in the background. Once you have selected the contact you wish to talk/SMS with, the menu resolves into a list of numbers for the contact and 2 large soft-keys to either make a call or send SMS. Choosing the SMS option will open the default WinMo SMS application, which is pretty lame. They should go ahead and modify the Phone History feature to include SMS texting in a chat-like format, IMHO.

History

To view a history of incoming SMS, phone calls, and phone stats, select the Today screen history button, and P4 presents a colorful list indicating contact, time, date and number and type (with a handy icon). There are a number of filtering options that allow you to group the history by caller, missed calls, outgoing, or SMS. You can also quickly initiate calls/SMS by selecting a contact/number from the list. The SMS listings get a minor honorable mention here, because as you highlight a multi-line message, the highlighted block automatically scrolls the message so you can read it. You can also fire off a “make appointment” from here (in Contacts as well), which essentially launches a new appointment screen in the WM calendar app. The contact you selected is not automatically added to the attendees list, which would be a better implementation of this enhancement. Tap-n-hold and soft-menu access both still require some stylus work as P4 presents traditional WM-style menus in response.

Contacts and Favorites

The Contacts app is truly my favorite P4 tool, which is why I wondered at it not being featured in the Today plug-in. Inesoft allows you to customize, add and delete contact fields and will search them all when you filter your dialing input. This comes at a small price, however, in that it has to index or re-index the contact information. For example, I added some test contact complete with photos, IM information, home page link, etc (see below). The notes field even includes a basic drawing menu bar to add a doodle to the notes field. You can also set up custom calling card fields for dialing long card numbers. The view options of the main screen combined with the sorting capabilities are also a standout., but here again, I wish they would just get rid of the ugly scrollbars (WM scrollbars must die!). Gestures are the future, and scrollbars are the past (WM dev guys...repeat after me...). Still, I like the ability to drag the panes and change the view options easily. The fact that you still need the stylus hurts it a bit. After you add contacts, tis very easy to add them to the P4 Favorites display, keeping family family and friends one-touch away.

Profiles and Caller ID

The profiler app allows you to quickly control phone settings through profiles. You can set tone volume, the level of vibration, block/allow calls from groups of contacts, turn on/off wifi, BT and the phone, and/or set up auto-SMS reply (“I'm at Lunch! Call you later...”). These can be set on a timed schedule, for instance, to shut off the phone at night. When you receive a call, the caller ID screen will identify the caller (and display the contact picture you've associated), and allow you to quickly answer/refuse the call, turn on the speaker, make a callback or send a quick SMS.

Conclusion:

There were more items (like all the options and profile settings) I wanted to cover, but I have kept it brief for the reader's sake. It would have been nice to have some on-device help, as not everything is intuitive in this application. Most of the basic stuff mentioned here can be puzzled out without too much outside help (how hard can it be to dial a phone?). If you want to learn more this product, go here. I provided the download link above. I feel P4 is a pretty stable application. I installed it to my main device memory, and it un-installed without complaint. I re-installed it and it worked just fine again. It hasn't crashed or mis-behaved. I recommend Inesoft Phone 4, especially if you have an older device and want to extend the phone capabilities past what may be lacking natively. However, for the price, I would like to see Inesoft take the next step and totally replace the integrated Windows messaging screens and get rid of the scrollbars and menus as much as possible. A fully functional 14-day trial is available at the download site.