MotionApps mDesktop: One cool piece of software

If you’re like me then you have a cradle and also leave your Tilt in said cradle most of the time.  Finally, you remove Tilt from cradle every time you get a text message or want to install a piece of software.

Well the days of doing that are finally over.  Now we can leave the Tilt in it’s cradle and control the unit from our PCs (not to mention, text message with unprecedented speed and ease).

Now I was hoping to make this a video review but I’m currently away from my camera, hope you guys understand.  But getting into the software, a significant amount of functionality has been packaged into a relatively small piece of software.  A single installer on your PC, then just connect your Tilt (or other Windows Mobile based device) via ActiveSync, and hit Connect.  The mDesktop software automatically downloads a small executable to your phone and executes it and the connection then negotiates and is established, boom you’re on your phone now.  At first glance you’ll just get a dialer screen allowing you to call from your PC over your phone’s service (please note that the microphone and speaker are not brought to your PC with it at this time).  A little disappointing that it doesn’t bring audio to your PC but it’s not that huge of a deal as it’s one of the only functions that requires removing the Tilt from it’s cradle and how often do people have headsets or similar to talk over their PCs with?

More after the break.

If you click down one tab, you’ll be greeted with the SMS(aka Text Message) tab, which does allow you to bring your text messages to your PC and believe me, this is a great thing.  Now you can utilize the power of your desktop keyboarding skills to shoot off those text messages to your friends and contacts with incredible speed and ease.  I found this functionality to work extremely well albeit a bit laggy whenever sending text messages.  That’s not a huge deal though, we can multitask can we not?  Plus the desktop popup notifications of text messages are GREAT.  One of the shortcomings is that it does not pull down the multimedia part of your MMSs to your PC, but it does show you the text overview of the message at least.  Also it does not show your sent text messages in the threaded display (for us WM6.1 users) nor does it mark your received and replied to text messages as read.

A tab farther down shows you the contacts list, which allows you to sort through your contacts and call, txt, or email your contacts.  Emailing your contacts opens your default email program with the contact’s email already seeded in the "To:" box which seems a bit redundant if you sync your contacts to your PC, but it’s probably a really nice feature for those of you who don’t.  Calling initiates a call on your phone the same way the dialer feature does, and text message pops up a box that allows you to send an SMS to that contact.

Now a truly nice feature is the agenda tab which shows you your current Calendar and Tasks list as well as allowing you to add to both lists.  Again, fairly redundant if you Sync with Outlook, but very valuable if you do not.

Another tab down adds in a pretty nice picture previewer, allowing you to see all of the pics on your device and also gives you drag-and-drop functionality to move the pictures to your PC with extreme ease.  Great for those who like to see what pics are on their device before moving them over.

A tab bellow that is a file browser, that gives more drag-and-drop functionality to moving files to and from your Tilt with more of a native feel (native to Windows Mobile devices that is) than the Windows File Explorer.

The tab bellow that is one I REALLY like.  The "Remote Desktop" tab, which brings the "desktop" of your Tilt (including click and type functionality) to your desktop machine.  If you didn’t want to use the other features than I think this is one of the bigger selling points.  Some activities may be a bit cumbersome on the Tilt itself (product keys anyone?) but this really helps alleviate some of the woes with that by giving you your desktop keyboard and mouse.  Seriously, this is one of the cooler features of the software.

And narrowing down the list, we have just two features left.  The first is a drag-and-drop box that allows you to drag CABs to be installed on your Tilt over and dragging Favorites over for your mobile favorites bar.  The second is just an information screen that gives general info about your device including OS, IMEI, phone number, screen resolution, memory, etc.  Pretty self explanatory and is pretty accurate as well (although not wholly so).

So that brings us to a wrap up.  Overall I found this software to be extremely intuitive and useful, albeit a tad bit on the buggy side.  At time of writing they were at version 1.0.3 which is the version I used.  It seemed to cause my scrollwheel to bug out (soft reset fixed it) and caused quite a bit of hanging.  Also in the remote desktop feature, there’s no clipboard sync’ing either, which is semi-disappointing regarding the software key technique I was talking about earlier.

However, considering the amount of functionality this software enables, and that you can get the latest bugfix clients for free (bottom of the page), I’d say my complaints about it are minor.

So what’re you waiting for?  Head on over to MotionApps (linkage bellow) and try it out.

MotionApps mDesktop homepage

Note: All of the screenshots with the exception of the first one were furnished from MotionApps, content (c) to them.

EDIT: I was contacted by MotionApps and they’ve informed me that quite a few of the bugs I listed are known issues and are being worked on, including text messages not being marked as read.  They’ve also taken things like putting sent messages in threaded view for us WM6.1 users and forwarded the information to their project management team for review and possibly addition into future versions.  They’ve also spoke about the clipboard sync’ing as well.  Finally, they’re also saying that future versions of mDesktop will not even require you to hit "Connect" whenever you want to connect to your phone, it will be an automatic thing from there on out.  Like I said, the whole bug issue is well under control and mostly a minor thing right now.  Within a few weeks this software could become extremely stable and feature rich.  Measuring how powerful it is now, I say it’s very likely.

Written by Tyler · Filed Under Fuzesite, Mobilitysite Reviews 
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