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Resco File Explorer 2003
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By Anthony Newman, Tuesday 21 January 2003  
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File management on your trusty Pocket PC getting you down? Anthony Newman takes Resco's File Explorer for a spin and finds a new feature-packing, registry-hacking soulmate.
It's a familiar trend with bundled Pocket PC applications that they never do quite enough as some users would like. From the basic PIM applications, through Pocket IE and Pocket Word, to Windows Media Player, a whole range of third party releases have sought to remedy some of these deficiencies.
 | Resco's latest incarnation of its File Explorere sports a veritable barrage of features
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The built-in File Explorer is no exception, and, shocking as it may seem, it was only with Pocket PC 2002 that it could create shortcuts. So, for a new year we have a major new release of Resco's File Explorer, a program that now boasts some very impressive features indeed.
Resco File Explorer (RFE) is a small utility for managing the file system of your Pocket PC. Operating through a simple two-pane interface and hierarchical file structure, the user has access to all the files and folders on the device, including its ROM and any storage cards, and can perform a range of basic actions from either a menu, icon bar or tap-and-hold menu, just like the built-in explorer and its larger desktop cousin. All pretty straightforward so far, I hear you say. True, but RFE has a veritable mountain of features yet to come.
Firstly, it supports encryption for any file from within the program and from a desktop applet too. Yes, encryption: securing your data is no longer separate from organizing it. Secondly, it has network support, allowing you to browse the files of any machine you are connected to, which is increasingly useful with the proliferation of wireless devices. RFE boasts a system info page showing memory and power info to keep you aware of what's going on in your Pocket PC. It includes a fully-featured registry editor for applying hacks, and treats the registry as just another folder. To minimise the hassle of moving around the machine there are a range of shortcuts and user-configurable shortcuts to areas of your machine, as well as a powerful search tool. Once you've found some files, you can sort them any way you choose, and display them in a number of ways to suit your preference - there're even different font sizes available, and ClearType in all views. There are also useful links to receiving beamed files without having to leave the program, and from a tap-and-hold menu you can beam or email any file. Indeed, thanks to an internal viewer, some common file types can be opened without having another program installed. File attributes can be modified, and program associations changed. Perhaps the biggest new feature of the program, alongside encryption, is its new support for compression, and RFE now replaces Resco's own Zipper program. It handles zipped files with no trouble at all and creating them just as easily, at different levels of compression and all the usual options familiar to users of desktop compression utilities.
Availability
Resco File Explorer is available now for all Pocket PCs from the Resco website for $19.95 USD.
Conclusion
With this single release, Resco have rendered several different applications obselete and combined them into one svelte, integrated solution. What's more, this is at a fraction of the combined cost of the separate utilities. Despite all our attempts to find something that Resco have missed, some feature that is absent, unintuitive, or even slow, we came up empty. Briefly put, RFE is a sprightly, compact little program, despite its comprehensive feature set, and try as we may we cannot find a single thing wrong with it.
- What's positive: Has every feature under the sun, including encryption and compression
- What's negative: It doesn't come as standard in the ROM
Overall: 
Conclusion
With this single release, Resco have rendered several different applications obselete and combined them into one svelte, integrated solution. What's more, this is at a fraction of the combined cost of the separate utilities. Despite all our attempts to find something that Resco have missed, some feature that is absent, unintuitive, or even slow, we came up empty. Briefly put, RFE is a sprightly, compact little program, despite its comprehensive feature set, and try as we may we cannot find a single thing wrong with it.
What's positive:
Has every feature under the sun, including encryption and compression
What's negative:
It doesn't come as standard in the ROM
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| Hands-on impressions, news, reviews, prices and release dates; now all-in-one-page: |
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