The next application I'll show you is the Mobile SmartPack by Resco.  It consists of the following three titles for your smartphone:

1. Resco Photo Viewer & Desktop Optimizer - This is an excellent picture viewer for your smartphone that will allow you to generate albums using the desktop application for easy viewing on your smartphone.

2. Resco Explorer 2003 - An advanced file management utility for your smartphone with many advanced features not found on the file explorer in Smartphone 2002.

3. Resco System Toys - Consists of two easy to use tools:  Battery State and Task Manager.  The Battery State utility will allow you to view battery level as well as the state of both your internal and memory card.  The Task Manager will allow you to close to switch to any open applications.

Resco System Toys allows you to easily switch between battery and memory to view graphical information about the status of both your battery and available memory.

Resco Explorer 2003 offers many additional features not found in the file explorer included in Smartphone 2002.  You can compress, encrypt and edit all your files all from your smartphone.  There is an options menu which offers many user-defined settings on how the program will handle your files.  It's the most feature-rich file management utility available for smartphones.

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This Resco Photo Viewer is best photo viewer I've found for smartphones.  Using the included desktop album generator, you can easily create photo albums for easy viewing on your smartphone.  Powerpoint presentations can also be imported into the album generator.

The main menu was designed to give you quick access to your albums as well as files that are stored on the phone or on your memory card.  You can open an album you created and view an auto slideshow of all images with transition effects or generate a manual slideshow as well.  This slideshow feature works great and is the best way of viewing or presenting pictures on your smartphone.

More information on Resco products can be found on the Resco Website.

The last highly useful application that I will be showing you is Mapopolis from the folks over at, you guessed it, Mapopolis.  I've used their excellent software on Pocket PC's in the past and now it is available for smartphones as well.  Mapopolis is the most powerful map viewing application for handheld devices.  It consists of the map viewer application and individual area maps that you can download from the Mapopolis website.  The individual maps include street detail, addresses, and thousands of landmarks, business listings, and other points of interest.  Mapopolis also includes a powerful find feature which allows cities, streets, and landmarks to be searched and selected by name or landmarks to be searched and selected by category and name. The selected item is then highlighted on the map.  Street intersections or street addresses can also be located.  It's not just a map viewer though!  You also have the ability to automatically generate point-to-point-driving directions "on-the-fly" from your smartphone.  Selecting from the map or using an address find feature sets start and end points. Directions can be viewed as turn-by-turn text, which also displays distance as well as a highlighted route on the map.

There is so much you can do and I can't possibly show you everything but I'll point out some of the best features.

You can zoom in and out at any place on the map.  From the main menu, you can find a particular address, get directions, define views and much more.  You can find a point in the map by either address or street, category, intersection or even an address from someone on your smartphones contact list. 

There is even GPS device support as well.  Unfortunately, you won't be able to take advantage of this great feature with the MPX200 at the moment.  There are tons of categories you can choose to find a particular place.  The maps are so well designed that they cover just about everything from banks and hospitals to auto repair shops and grocery stores.

The city of Miami, FL is huge so I was a bit skeptical as to just how precise the map would be.  I decided to put it to the ultimate test and look up some addresses as well as get directions to a variety of known places.  I was completely impressed at just how well this worked.  It found all addresses and the directions where also very accurate.  I even compared the results to online services such as mapquest and yahoo.  You can view a split screen of the route as well as the text directions.  You can even save your routes for quick access later or even save the directions to a file.

I can't begin to tell you just how great this program is.  No matter where you are, if you have the appropriate map files on your smartphone, you'll find it hard to actually get lost.  Speaking from someone who has absolutely no sense of direction, I find this to be a highly useful software application that all should have on their handheld devices.

More information on this product can be found on the Mapopolis Website.

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