eWallet for windows mobile/ pocketpc

Thanks to Julie at Ilium software for letting me try out eWallet for my HTC Vox smartphone. I was keen to try this out as I have been a long term SplashID user, 5 years or so, and had never really considered trying out an alternative application to it. I'm glad I did as eWallet is really very nice.

Firstly, let's get the important bits out of the way. It looks great, way better than SplashID's interface with nice icons representing different categories of personal information. Not hugely important admittedly (well it is to me being an eye-candy type of shallow guy) but it does add a little extra and makes you think...there's a lot of time and effort gone into this.

Disappointingly, I couldn't find a way to get my SplashID info into eWallet so I had to go through a manual exercise but that was actually quite useful because I finally got around to clearing out a load of stuff that I don't need anymore so I suppose that was a blessing in disguise. It transpires however that they thoughtfully provide a "card importer" to download info from excel files...doh. Just shows you should read all the stuff before diving into these apps.

What's good about eWallet? Lots of nice touches. It comes with pre-defined categories for different types of secure info and tyhese can be edited to suit your needs. Their Bank Accounts and Credit Card categories needed no alterations. What is especially nice is the visual aspect. Your personal details for credit cards are presented on screen as....a credit card, as you will see from the pic on the left above. Sadly, I rather liked that. I feel that it presents on screen info and defines categories better than SplashID, I just found it easier to find stuff in eWallet instead of having to scroll through lists of categories in SplashID.

It allows for nested categories, which I'm not a huge fan of but it does allow you to have less on display on the screen and the idea is a good one as different things can be linked together. Whereas with SplashID I had about 20 odd different categories and had to scroll up and down to find stuff, eWallet lets you nest similar items together which makes it easier to see linked items and provides for less on screen clutter.

Syncing is easy too...like a lot of Ilium's stuff they walk you through the syncing process which for new users makes it less stressful. Hey, even for old hands like it it is still a nice touch. The desktop application, which is well worth getting, lets you sync to multiple users including "multiple pda's" and laptops.

You can even add your own graphics or icons to categories....their Iomega iStorage allows you to view data from a remote desktop. This is a seriously well specced up application which to be frank, knocks SplashID for six. It's odd, but one or two of SplashData's stuff are starting to look a little long in the tooth these days when compared to newer entrants.

If you are in the market for a nice looking, well supported, easy to set up and sync password manager then eWallet should be very high up your list of try-outs.