Omega One have released their latest version of Battery Pack Pro, and I must say that it comes with a complete range of features that makes other Task Manager come Today Screen applications appear rather featureless!

Let's start by having a look at the included applications and tools, as posted on the Omega One web site.

• Battery Bar: Displays Battery, Memory, Storage Card, Network connection, Time, World Time & backlight data on the today screen. Tap on each section for detailed information. Speaks to you when your battery, memory or storage cards are low, or battery is fully charged. Battery life is shown in hours and minutes. This customizes itself to how you use your Pocket PC over time.
• Program Bar: Create up to 160 shortcuts to your favorite Pocket PC programs right on your Today screen. Auto scroll to pack the maximum number of icons into the minimum space. Tap and hold on an item to find full information about it.
• Power Time: World time view. See where it's daylight, or check when your friends / customers are awake or at work. Automatically grabs the latest exchange rates & current weather conditions for each city. With Journal Bar installed, displays the current 5 day forecast for each city. Get detailed information about each city. With 1-Calc installed, tap on the exchange rate to launch 1-Calc to quickly convert currency.
• Power Task: Close button actually closes programs. Speed up your Pocket PC by closing slowly running programs taking up lots of memory. Keep your Pocket PC running as fast as the day you bought it!
• Power Bars: Displays the battery, memory & storage card life on the title bar - see your Pocket PCs vital statistics all the time.
• Power Clean: Reclaim valuable space by removing unwanted files automatically.
• Power Buttons: Launch 2 programs from each button on your Pocket PC. Tap to launch one, and tap & hold to launch the second one. Open settings applets, documents, or perform "special" functions like soft reset the device.
• Power Alert: Adjust Calendar, Task & Alarm sounds to repeat, change volume & more. Keep reminders quiet during meetings; have unique sounds so you know what the alert is!
• Power Store: Provides even more detailed battery, memory and storage card information. Keep a track on your battery, memory & network usage with graphs which show your usage over the past 24 hour period.
• Power Adjust: Customize your Pocket PC with lots of cool tricks, including different system fonts & animated windows.
• Power Light: Don't fumble with the keys in the dark - turn your Pocket PC screen into a flashlight, or a warning light for emergencies!
• Help: English, Français, Deutsch, Español, Nederlands, Svenska & Magyarul.

From this list of included applications, I can see why they call this application Battery Pack Pro, as Omega One have certainly packed in a lot of features.  There was a time when I had many applications installed to improve the Pocket PC experience.  I have outlined below what I normally had running, and what each application did.

• Pocket Plus: Task Manager and today screen program launcher
• Spb Time: Display world times and screen saver
• Pocket Cleaner Plus and Space Reclaimer: Clean up temporary files
• Alarm Today: Takes over the poor alarm utility, and makes for higher reliability of alarms sounding
• Tweaks 2k2.Net: Tweak display settings and other nifty adjustments

Now all I have installed is Battery Pack Pro, as this package does all the functions of the seperate applications above (with the exception of playing mp3's as alarms).  Omega One claim that this is the only application you will ever need.  I am starting to think that they are right!  This release also packages together all of the power tools under one user interface, which makes power cleaning, tweaking and monitoring all the more easier.  Speaking of monitoring, their Power Store application has impressed me with the information collected and nicely displayed about the battery, memory and network useage. (Refer to the animation above for a slide show of all the Battery Pack Pro features)  The only suggestions I would make to improve Battery Pack Pro is to provide .mp3 and .wma support for alarm sounds, stored in RAM or on SD card.

From the past few weeks of using Battery Pack Pro, I haven't noticed any issues leading to a soft reset (like their older versions have from time to time), which leads me to believe this version is quite stable.  I was also happy to read that Battery Pack Pro is compatible with all Pocket PC operating systems, including WM 5.0 and Smart Phones.  Omega One have done a great job creating this application, and Battery Pack Pro will be installed on my XDA Atom - when it eventually arrives!

Battery Pack Pro can be purchased and downloaded from the Omega One Website, for $29.99 USD ($3.00 USD more for their download protection service).  If you have been a long time user of other task manager applications, and feel like a change, download the time trial version and check it out for yourself.  Existing Battery Pack users can upgrade to the latest version for $9.99 USD.

I give Omega One's Battery Pack Pro a Nice 9/10