Allgemein

Introduction
In August a year ago, I was looking for a tool to synchronise my SMS with my PC via IrDA Infrared. After testing a few products and concluding that none of them fitted my needs, I was close to just giving up, but then I saw a link in a mobile website to Oxygen with their Phone Manager Software and a short look at the screenshots made me think: „now my search will be over!“ I downloaded it and testing it was real fun for me, just about everything seemed to work the way I liked it! -From this point onwards I’ve used this tool every day to synchronise my SMS on my PC, so I could keep my loss of SMS very small! I’ve also decided to put the Phone Manager on my download site and in a very short time it broke the TOP charts, and it is with over 2000 downloads the third most downloaded file (the above ones had started counting nearly a year before!) and it is still getting closer to the 2nd place! For the future time I’ve noticed a few things that I would like to have improved, mainly it was, that the SMS were saved in a text file instead of a database, this gave low performance when I had about 1000 SMS and also, when the program crashed (it did so every time when I ended it and a SMS arrived at just that time), so I lost about 1/3 of my SMS. -I’ve made this a bit better by writing a script that backed up my SMS files every night. But soon, I saw, that the Oxygen Phone Manager II is in work and I was very happy, when I noticed, that the new version would be database driven! I couldn’t wait until I could download the first beta! Below I’ve written a review on the Oxygen Phone Manager II!

Download and Install
The Download of the 3.5 MB big file goes quick and the installation is very easy and well done, in 2 minutes you have the Program running!

First view
As soon as I started the Phone Manager, a Dialog Box asked me, if I wanted to check the Internet for updates:

Update Feature

I like such features, but the update check feature could be still smarter, for example auto updating the Application, as done in Norton Antivirus, or Gnucleus.

The Main Window is clear and has a Windows Explorer-like interface; there are currently 3 items: Phonebook, Logos and SMS Manager and Oxygen said, that they would provide Calendar and Profiles Management in the next versions. You can access the items easily on the top icon bar, the „Phone Explorer“, or the „Quick Jump“ Button. And because you can manage multiple phones in the Program, it makes it very easy for managing your 2nd phone, or for family usage!

Phonebook
Once clicked on the Button „Read from Phone“, I’ve got all my Phonebook Data in the Program, where I can save it on the Disk, or edit them; a click on „Write to Phone“ will update the changes. There are also very many import options, that let you import your data from Outlook, Lotus Notes, Windows Address book, or a CSV file. Of course you can export your phone data again in these applications and in addition you can export them to: Text, Excel, RTF, XML and some more! If you want to import some data and have characters that are too long, you can automatically correct them with Oxygen’s „Correct illegal Entries“ feature.

Capture Window
Logos
On the item „Logos“ you can find a very easy and powerful Logo Editor here for creating Start up, Operator, and Group Logos. A very nice feature is for example the „Capture Window“: From now on the long procedure of making screenshot, editing, exporting and importing it belongs to the past; just move the Capture Window over an item, size it right and click the green capture button!

SMS Manager
The probably most wanted feature of Oxygen’s Phone Manager is its SMS Manager! It has the look and feel of Microsoft’s Outlook Express, so if you use this mail program, it feels very familiar, but even if you don’t use OE, the interface is very easy! In addition to the default folders, you can create an unlimited number of your own folders; a small icon next to the folders and messages shows you, if they are stored in the Phone, or on the hard disk; with one click you can change the save location. If you’ve worked with the old SMS Manager from Oxygen, you can easily import the old messages, of course including the folders and in a few seconds you’ve got your old folder structure with all messages included. You now also have the same functions like your mail program: Reply, Forward, Print, Find, Save, Sort and some specials, like the „shrinking“ feature, this allows you to automatically replace „long“ characters into short ones; for exp. „one“ will be replaced with 1 and „you“ will be replaced with u.

SMS Manager Window

The Languages
Multilingual
The same as it was in the version before, the Phone Manager is very multilingual, currently the following languages besides English are supported: Chinese Traditional, German, Danish, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian and Swedish! -But the other translations are not always perfect; there are for exp. several wrong expressions & expressions on the wrong place in the German version; you could think, Oxygen had in this more an eye on quantity instead of Quality and also, you cannot edit (correctly) the files the way you could in the first version, because the languages are stored in a binary file too.
-But with all this features that Oxygen has built in it’s Phone Manager, this really isn’t too bad.

Pros and Cons
The Oxygen Phone Manager is one of the rare softwares, where it’s difficult to find negative things!

+Complete Mobile Phone Management
+Very good SMS Manager
+Multilingual
+Many updates

-Still a few bugs
-Some mistakes in translations

If you got suggestions to this review, feel free to mail them to: reviews@tech-island.com

Weitere Infos: http://www.oxygensoftware.com/