Review of QuickLaunch for BlackBerry Smartphones
In my endless pursuit of an improved BlackBerry experience I've always found myself thinking in what ways could the user experience of the native OS and applications improve, enter QuickLaunch. QuickLaunch is a productivity application that creates shortcuts to almost any application and function on your device. QuickLaunch will also allow you to remove several other applications that are included as built in features. Hit the jump for screen shots and a video walk through.
After installing QuickLaunch you will be brought to the set up screen, from here you can choose what applications and functions you want to setup a shortcut to as well as be able to add contact, email and website shortcuts.
One of the first things you'll notice after the install and set up is the diversity and array of things this app does, from shortcuts to your most used contacts to your most used settings and controls. If you are running several different apps for soft reset features as well as screen captures you will no longer have to. QuickLaunch has a soft reset feature as well as a screen capture feature built in, this will allow you to free up some memory on some older devices if you happen to run multiple apps. Another great feature of QuickLaunch is that it does not run in the background using phone resources, it only runs when opened.
The shortcut features really make navigating the OS much simpler. You can add shortcuts to all of your apps and features that are not set up in the home screen icons. This in itself proved quite valuable for me, I am now able to launch an app and even change options right from the home screen. Quick launch makes use of both convenience keys as well has the volume up and down buttons, I should also note QuickLaunch only takes control of all side keys when you are actually using the app. Other than that QuickLaunch is only assigned to one convenience key. The default setup has the right convenience key launching the app, once launched the left convenience key closes the app out and the volume keys let you navigate up and down the QuickLaunch menu.
QuickLaunch adds the ability to include the high, low and current temperatures using Yahoo weather. All you do is punch in your location ID and QL will display temps at the top of the menu. You also have the option for QuickLaunch to display the date and time at the top of the menu as well.
The multitude of functions that QuickLaunch does is truly amazing from launching your favorite websites to launching pre stored phone numbers to toggling on and off all connections including bluetooth and wifi. You can even control the backlight of your device via QuickLaunch. One of the most useful features to me is the ability to launch a small screen that gives your device info including OS version, platform, PIN number, IMEI number, the amount of time running since the last battery pull, signal strength, battery percentage, amount of free memory and finally the amount of free space on the media card. I will cover a few more of the features in the video walkthrough.
So at this point you are probably saying to yourself "this is a pretty neat app but is it worth $4.99?" My answer to that is a resounding YES!! QuickLaunch is by far worth paying $4.99 for, without a doubt it is the best productivity application I have ever used. I think you'd be doing yourselves quite the favor by purchasing QuickLaunch, so head on over to ShopCrackBerry.com and pick yourself up a copy!
** This review was written as part of the CrackBerry Idol 2010 competition. Click for details. **
