e-Natives Showcase review

Dave Oliver

We review e-Natives Showcase, a finger-friendly task manager

Published on Nov 9, 2009

Chances are that your Windows Mobile device came with a stylus. Even with relatively finger-friendly shells like HTC's TouchFLO or Vito's Winterface, you'll still need it when you get deep into the Windows Mobile menus.

Many people however are very used to the standard Windows Mobile Today page and task manager, but could also use a little more thumb-friendly action forquick access. That's where Showcase comes in.

The e-Natives Showcase has a simple goal – to eliminate the need for a stylus when you're using your task manager. It doesn't mess with the formula too much, and offers outsize versions of the usual graphics so you can access them easily with thumb or finger.

You can press their icon to open them or press the red 'X' to close them, and, er, that's pretty much it in terms of functionality.

It's bright and colourful and really intuitive to use, with up to five applications visible on the screen at any one time and you can scroll to the rest.

At the bottom there's a row of icons for return, a quick-close button that shuts down all your open apps, a memory icon that shows a percentage of how much is being used as a result of your open apps.

Click on the icon and it will give you a breakdown of what's being used in terms of storage and application memory. All the icons along the bottom are easily accessible by thumb.

Fortunately, there's no need to launch Showcase from your Windows menu, which for many of the more chubby-fingered among us, can necessitate using the stylus in any case.

Once it's installed, Showcase automatically turns your Windows 'X' key into the program launcher. So you've only to press and hold the 'X' in the top right hand corner of the screen, and a second or so later, Showcase launches. You can also slide your finger along from the 'X' to return to your previous screen.

Despite some suggestions that we found online, we didn't notice that it loads particularly slowly, but it would have been useful if you could have launched applications from within Showcase, or if it had offered an outsize version of the Start menu.

You can access the standard Start menu, but the finger-friendly treatment only applies to those programs which are already open.

It's a simple app with a simple purpose, which is by no means a bad thing. It's very easy to use and once you've tried it, it's difficult to go back to life without it.