Personal, Text and Reference, and Travel

This year over 80 experts judged 543 Pocket PC and Smartphone nomination for the Pocket PC magazine Best Software Awards 2004. Our judges had plenty to say about their favorite products. In this issue we are publishing their comments about the programs nominated for the Personal, Text and Reference, and Travel software categories. The purpose of publishing the comments is to give insights into a variety of products—not to show how the judges voted. The winners and finalists can be found on our Web site (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/awards/main.asp). For the sake of brevity, we've included only one comment per product and edited them for clarity and brevity.

Personal

Shawna Kelly

Wine Enthusiast

is a classy and well-rounded guide that lets you look up wine ratings, track your favorite wines in detail, quickly access wine terminology, and more.

Wine Enthusiast: Pocket PC guide to wines

Myron Swartz

Pocket Cook

has a powerful desktop PC component and can import mealmaster recipes readily available from the Internet.

David Hettel

Pocket Genealogist

has a rich feature set. It is also growing and evolving each month, getting better and better.

Pocket Genealogist tracks your family tree

John Hung

Pocket Diet Tracker

is the best program if you're only interested in keeping track of your dietary intake.

John Ohnstad

MySport Training

is an excellent application that installs in a modular form with workout, meal, and diet tracking modules. What I like most about this application is that there is an add-on that allows users of Polar Heart Rate Monitors (S-Series equipped with Infrared) to transmit heart rate information from their workouts into their handheld.

MySport Training helps you track workouts, meals, and your diet.

Text and Reference

Matthew Miller

Pocket e-Sword

is an amazing free product for Bible reading, and offers quick tabbing between Bibles, dictionaries, and notes. The search user interface, ability to compare translations on the fly, huge font selection, and ability to highlight verses are outstanding features. I also like the ability to setup custom Bible reading plans and the integrated prayer request module. Even though I am a long time PocketBible user, I will now be using and may even be switching to Pocket e-Sword.

Pocket e-Sword is a free, feature-rich Bible reading program.

John Ohnstad

PocketBible

reigns supreme with features, readability, compatibility, and the desire of Laridian to continue to improve an already great product.

Dave Burrows

LexisGoo English Dictionary

is one of the most popular dictionaries on the Pocket PC, and as soon as you start up Lexisgoo you can see why. Not only is it a full-fledged dictionary, but it provides audible pronounciations, grammar tips, and an effective writing handbook including over 4140 Idioms, and also has pattern-searching for words, which is ideal for doing crossword puzzles! A truly great dictionary to have in your pocket!