Reviews

SplashPhoto

March 20, 2002

Do you have JPGs, GIFs, and BMPs that you’d like to be able to see on your Palm OS handheld? You don’t have to have the latest and greatest either— any III series or later Palm, HandSpring Visor, Somy Clie, or HandEra with at least Palm OS 3.1 will work. If you don’t have a color screen, you can use SplashPhoto and get some pretty nice greyscale images, or if you have a color handheld you can get either 8 bit or 16 bit color images that look surprisingly good. Everything is converted using the SplashPhoto Desktop program, which is a snap to use— browse your hard drive and find the photo you would like to use, use the very simple tools to zoom or crop, choose the color depth, adjust the brighthness and contrast if you would like, and click install. The program then converts the picture and puts it into your Install Tool directory so that you can get the photo onto your device during the next HotSync operation.  

One thing you have to remember is that you can only see as much of your photo as will fit into that little box on the desktop program. In essence it is the same size as your handheld’s screen, which means that once the photo is on your device you won’t be able to scroll around with your stylus and see other parts of the picture. This is obviously something of a drawback, but it isn’t all that bad— the desktop program does let you choose exactly what you want very easily, and this does keep the image size down. A greyscale image will take up about 15K of memory, a 4 bit color image will take 25K, and a 16 bit color image will require about 50K of space. The sample pictures you see here were taken with an Olympus D490 Zoom digital camera and converted to 16 bit color images using the SplashPhoto Desktop. I’m quite pleased with the results.  

The handheld portion of the program has quite a few nice features as well- there’s a built in slideshow with customizable time settings (from two to thirty seconds for each photo), as well as the ability to view thumbnail images of each picture. If you have a VFS-enabled Palm, you can easily move pictures back and forth to a memory card, without any noticeable slowdown in SplashPhoto. You can also beam images, either individually or by category. All in all, SplashPhoto is a very well-designed application. It works intuitively and passed my patented “PocketGoddesses don’t read instruction manuals” test with flying colors. It’s certainly well worth purchasing for only $9.95, and there is a generous free trial available if I haven’t already convinced you. Get it at the SplashData web site.

PocketGoddess rating for SplashPhoto:

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