Review: OmegaOne 1-ToGo Brings The Mobile Internet Straight to Your Device

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It should be obvious by now that the hot topic of 2008 is destined to be the mobile Internet. More specifically, browsing the Internet from your phone. There are now well over a dozen competitors for the title of Windows Mobile Internet King, and many of them are extremely worthy of that title. But what of the user who does not want to flounder through various web sites. Many people don’t need to access the full Internet. They just want simple and instant access to today’s headlines, their email, RSS feeds, or other specialized information. For those users, Omega One brings you its powerful new Internet tool, 1-ToGo.

Overview: So. What is 1-ToGo? I think I have never had so much trouble in a review explaining just what a program is. It’s a little bit of everything. So, let’s start with what this is not. It is not a mobile web browser. You will still need one of those (Pocket Internet Explorer will work just fine). This is a web-based applet which will open within your existing browser. From there, well, maybe it is best to let Omega One explain what this program can do:

Mobilize your phone with this great new product!

The best of the web in an easy-to-use mobile format. Weather, news, stocks, email, IM, chat, class leading world time application, movie times, games, currency converter and much, much more!

Wow! That is a pretty tall order. Essentially, all of your vital information, all in one place.

Setup: Omega One’s 1-ToGo is designed to be your one stop shop for all of your critical Internet based information. Of course, this means the application comes some assembly (or customization) required. Fortunately, the setup is a snap, and only needs to be done once. After you have completed this process, the information which is most important to you will be readily accessible at any time (of course, if your needs change, you can update these settings at any time).

To access the setup menu, just select Settings from the pulldown menu. From here, you can access any subcategory of information, and tell 1-ToGo which feeds/information you would like to access and which ones you want to see on the Front Page. Just make your choices from the onscreen menus and you will be ready to go. Piece of cake!

Front Page: Your main access point for 1-ToGo is the front page. This is where you put your most important information, the stuff you want to see at a glance. I keep my My Today Screen updates, news feeds and the weather here, but you could also choose to keep your stocks, movies, and more in this screen. I did find that customization was a bit tricky. There was not really any way to manually arrange the information on this screen. Overall, though, the Front Page does an excellent job of providing access to your most important information at a quick glance. Tap any story or feed to get more detailed information.

Of course, in addition to the Front Page, you have considerably more access to all of your various feeds by selecting the appropriate category from the pulldown menu. The pulldown menu lists out all of the pages and services to which you have subscribed. It would be nice, however, if this menu was organized a little better, or even divided into a top level menu and sub-menus for easier navigation.

News Services: The bulk of the information you are going to find will come from the news feeds. These can be broken into several categories. First are actual news sources. There are online news outlets, such as CNN, the Washington Post, Google News, and other local and national news outlets across the country. One nice thing here is that you do not need to know any websites or URL addresses. Just select the language you wish to read, and then the category you wish to search. News categories are extremely broad and range from national and international news, all the way down to technology and Pocket PC’s. In each category, there is a list of news outlets from which you can choose. And if the one you want is not shown, then you can always email a recommendation for a new news feed. Aside from asking for a particular local news feed, however, I don’t think there will be many requests for additional sites.

Omega One has thought of almost everything, even including links to all of your favorite sports teams for up to the minute stats, scores and news.

Your second option for obtaining the news is through RSS feeds. Most sites these days will have an RSS feed, especially if it is a blog or other specialty site. Just select add a new RSS (from the News menu) and enter the information. Note that here you will need to know the URL of the RSS feed you wish to add.

One disappointment I had here was that you have to add all of your feeds individually. It would be nice if you could import feeds from sites like Google Reader, or from the OPML file in your Smartphone or Pocket PC RSS reader. Additionally, while you can view RSS feeds on your front page (but only in a limited fashion) or individually, there is no option to view all of your unread RSS feeds at once. This kind of aggregation of feeds would be an extremely useful addition to the program.

Finally, 1-ToGo allows you to track any changes to your investments. Of course, if you are like me these days, you would probably rather ignore your stocks…or maybe bury your money in the front yard in a mattress. Still, the ability to monitor the activity of the stock market from anywhere is an extremely useful tool. Just tap the Stocks Settings to enter any stock you want to track (either by ticker number or company name). View your selected stocks, or head on over to Charles Schwab for an overview of the day’s activities.

Weather: One of the most useful features in the program is the weather function. For starters, it will show you the current temperature (a feature missing from many weather applications) and the four day forecast (starting with today). While you can program as many cities as you want, only one city’s weather will be displayed on the front page. Tap anywhere on the display to go to the weather panel screen. Here, you can view the extended five-day forecast, as well as any weather advisories (these will also be shown on the Front Page).

From here, you can access a wide variety of weather related tools, including:

• Current conditions
• Detailed forecast
• World Time Information (including sunrise, sunset, area codes and currency for the selected city
• Static and animated radar images
• static and animated infrared images
• National Temperature Map
• National Conditions Map

One thing I did notice here, was that you could not zoom in on the maps and images. While the maps could be viewed as regions, you had to view the entire map at once. Thus, it could be difficult to determine the weather patterns in your area. It would be nice if you could zoom in so that you could view only a specific portion of the map, and determine the radar outlook for your area.

Finally, as I mentioned, you can add multiple cities to your weather list. When you do so, you can easily switch cities by simply selecting the one you want from the pull-down navigation menu. It would be nice, however, if you could view multiple cities at once for comparison.

Of course, all of this is pretty meaningless if the forecast is not accurate. I am pleased to say, therefore, that Omega One wisely chose to use the National Weather Service (which is part of NOAA) for its data. The National Weather Service is widely considered to be the most accurate weather forecast in the United States (I cannot speak for other countries) and is the basis for many weather services. What does this mean in terms of your day? If 1-ToGo says it will rain, then make sure you have an umbrella with you.

Communications: What can I say. Unless you have been living in a rock (and possibly even then) then you are probably aware that we are living in an age of instant electronic communications. Email, the old mainstay, is no longer fast enough with social networking, instant messaging, and now even Twitter (which I still have a hard time understanding). Of course, checking several email accounts, multiple social networking sites, and your IM networks can get to be a bit cumbersome after a while. As such, Omega One kindly put this all in one place for your convenience.

There are quite a few Internet based services included in this program, including:

• GMAIL
• Hotmail
• Yahoo Mail
• AOL Mail
• Facebook
• FlickR
• LinkedIn
• Windows Live Space

I could go on, but you get the point. Oddly enough, there was no access to Plaxo Pulse, which is one of my favorite services. Hopefully that omission can be remedied soon. Otherwise, all of your communication tools are right here under one roof…even Twitter.

The only real complaint I had about this option was that you cannot set 1-ToGo up to receive POP3 email from other accounts. This would have been a fantastic addition to the program. From what I understand, however, that requires a considerably more complicated structure than the program currently offers, but I maintain hope that Omega One is working toward a solution here.

Travel Tools: Of course, everything I have been discussing is great if you are staying in one place. But how often does that happen? I mean, come on. You are a jet setter. California one day, Washington, DC the next, and then you are off to London. Your switching time zones more often than underpants. Well, don’t worry, 1-ToGo has you covered (for your travels, you are on your own for the underwear.

If you are traveling to another country, you are probably already aware of this, but they do not always use the same money as us. So, you will need to be able to figure out how much local money your dollars are worth. I remember when I was in my 20’s, my wife and I went to Cancun. I was in a local shop making a purchase, but I had no Mexican money. “Don’t worry,” the woman said, “I take American money. So, I purchased an item for two pesos, and handed the woman a five dollar bill. I must not have been paying close attention, because it was not until hours later I realized that she had given me three pesos in change. Now, at that time, I think about 100 pesos equaled one dollar. Which meant I had just paid two dollars for an item which should have cost me only a few cents. Boy do I wish I had 1-ToGo and its currency calculator with me then (we’ll pretend that the Pocket PC had already been invented at that time).

With 1-ToGo, just enter the starting amount and the currency you wish to convert it to. Within seconds, you will know that one US dollar is currently worth .65 Euros (ouch).

But that is not all. The 1-ToGo converter can calculate over a dozen different measurements, weights, even cooking instructions. Just about anything that can be quantified can be converted. So, don’t worry about driving in France. 1-ToGo will quickly inform you that your current speed of 160 kilometers per hour, is a perfectly safe 100 miles per hour.

Just as important for you movers and shakers, however, is the world clock (pictured above). I mean, really, you always need to know what the local time is in other parts of the world. Forget doing time zone math (let’s see, England is 5 hours ahead of us, and it is 3 PM here, so that must mean it is …Thursday over there (sorry, old joke)).

The World Clock gives you quite a bit of information. First, the map of the world on top shows you the path of the sun. Where is it light? Where is it dark? Beneath that are clocks for each of your programmed cities. For each city, it will show the weather conditions and current local time. Heck, you can even check the phases of the moon from here. Not only is this a fantastic travel companion, but it will also be extremely useful for the ever common long distance meeting. Call London with confidence!

Fun Stuff: All work and no play….well, you probably remember what happened when Jack Nicholson worked too hard in The Shining. So, for those times when you need a little play, 1-ToGo offers a few choice games to keep you occupied. These include quite a few freeware games from around the web (many of which have been featured in previous editions of The Arcade). Just tap on the game you wish to download and start wasting time.

Of course, if you have a little extra time on your hands, then you might need more of a diversion than a few games can offer. In that case, check out the movie listings, which are automatically attuned to your default city. Check out the movie times in your area from anywhere on the road, and then head on over to the nearest showing of Iron Man.

Search: Of course, most of us do one thing on the Internet. We search. I search for almost everything on the Internet, and I like to do so from my mobile device as well. Sure, I can use Windows Live Search from my today screen, but that seems a bit limiting. Omega One, on the other hand, has built seven search engines into the program. Just select the ones you want, and they will appear at the bottom of every page. Now, in addition to everything else, you can get all of the information you want, in the format you need…from anywhere.

Feedback: Omega One has made an excellent program with 1-ToGo. But it is not perfect. There is a lot I would like to see added, including: Amazon.com search, eBay search, pop3 email, and driving directions. I am sure you can think of additional items. So, what do you do when you think of these? With most developers, make new feature requests can be a a frustrating experience (though there are some which make themselves extremely accessible to the community, which I think is fantastic).

In 1-ToGo, all you have to do is tap the Suggest an Improvement option. That’s it. Send your comment from anywhere. No need to wait until you are back at your desk to let Omega One know what you think. And if you find a problem, there is even a separate link for bug reports. And if you really like this product, Omega One has been kind enough to include a referral link which allows you to send the program to anyone in your address book.

I did make several suggestions using this form, and I was impressed by the response. Within 24 hours, I had received an email back either explaining their thoughts with respect to my suggestion. They did not always adopt my suggestion, but they did always explain their reasons.

Price: Just a quick note on price. This is not a one-time purchase program. Instead, 1-ToGo is a subscription service. Accessing it will cost $29.95 for the first year, and $19.95 for each consecutive year thereafter. The first time I saw this, I was considerably upset by this pricing. To be honest, though, once I started doing the math and realizing how many programs this would be replacing, I realized what a bargain it was. Replacing your weather app, Travel app, Email , RSS reader, and more, would likely cost well over $100. That is roughly 4-5 years worth of the 1-ToGo service. Not too shabby.

Conclusion: Omega One 1-ToGo does not offer anything you cannot find elsewhere on the web, instead, it takes everything you might use on the Internet and puts it all under one roof. It is kind of like the shopping mall of Internet applications. It takes all of the stores you like and puts them together under one roof. Frankly, I was amazed by all of the features included here. Of course, this is not to say there were no other features that could not have been included. I am quite sure that you all could think of other online services you would like to access that could have been included. For me, the list might include: driving directions, eBay, Amazon.com, and my Google suite of applications. So, I certainly hope that Omega One continues to develop and improve this one. Even without those additions, however, this is one of the most useful applications I have found for my Pocket PC. I use it every day, and each time I use it, I discover a new task this powerful tool can perform.

What I Liked :

• Everything under one roof
• Fantastic access to many Internet resources
• Easy to setup and use

What Needs Improvement:

• User interface could be better. Maybe replace pulldown menu with tabs
• Dozens of other resources could have been added
• Subscription service
• Weather service is a bit limiting. Especially maps which should offer more control for viewing.
• Can’t import OPML files or view your RSS feeds together at once.

Vital Stats:

Name: 1-ToGo

Developer: Omega One

Version: 1.0

Tested on: Windows Mobile 6

Also Available: Windows Mobile 5, Windows Mobile Smartphone

Price: $29.95 for the first year. $19.95 for each year thereafter

Trial: 30 days

Where to Buy: 1-ToGo

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