One of the great features of the Treo is that you can browse the web wherever you go. However, entering the long web links for some web sites into your Treo’s browser can range from inconvenient to impossible. The software that came with your Treo does a great job of syncing your contacts, calendar and tasks, but it doesn’t help with your internet favorites. That’s where Pocket Favorites from Chapura (the maker of PocketMirror) comes in handy.

Pocket Favorites allows you to synchronize the “Favorites” created in Internet Explorer with your Treo, allowing you to easily make dozens or hundreds of web sites immediately available for browsing from your Treo. And a great secondary benefit if you use you HotSync your Treo with multiple computers (such as your work and home computer) is that Pocket Favorites allows you to easily synchronize your Favorites between both computers. So if you add a good web site to your Favorites while browsing the web during your lunch break, the new Favorite will be added to your home computer when you sync at home.

Simple and to the Point

The concept is pretty simple and so is the application. The Pocket Favorites install program puts a copy of the Pocket Favorites program on your Treo and installs a conduit that synchronizes the Favorites on your PC with your Treo.

The Pocket Favorites Treo application consists of a single screen that lists all of your Favorites, organizing them in the same folders that you created in Internet Explorer.

If you select a Favorite from the list, the URL will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. A second tap on the item (in the tree control or on the URL at the bottom) will open the web site using your Treo’s Blazer browser. Once launched, you can add it to Blazer’s bookmarks so you can open it more quickly directly from Blazer in the future.

And that’s about it. You can’t arrange or organize the Favorites using your Treo, nor can you add new Favorites while browsing the web from your Treo. It only works with Internet Explorer, so Firefox fans are out of luck unless you want to periodically import your Internet Explorer Favorites into Firefox.

I mainly bought Pocket Favorites to help me synchronize my favorites between my work and home computer and it meets that need perfectly. I also created a separate folder just for Favorites I want to use with my Treo. When I’m browsing the web from my computer and find a great site that is designed for mobile device browsers, I’ll add it to this folder so it can be easily found. If I end up using a particular web site frequently I’ll then add it as a bookmark in Blazer.

I’ve been using Pocket Favorites for about 9 months and have found it quite useful. However, during this time there were two instances where I noticed that my Favorites were no longer synchronizing. A closer look indicated that a couple of newly added Favorites were causing the HotSync process to fail (apparently because Pocket Favorites didn’t like something in the URL for these links). Once I deleted these Favorites from my browser everything worked fine.

Conclusion

Pocket Favorites does one thing, synchronize your Favorites between one or more computers and your Treo, and it does it pretty well. If you use Internet Explorer as your primary web browser on your computer and/or synchronize your Treo with multiple computers, Pocket Favorites can be a great time saver and will make sure that you always have all of your Favorites with you wherever you go.

Pros:

• Allows full synchronization of Favorites between two or more computers

• Copies full folder structure defined in Internet Explorer
• HotSync log indicates how many items were added/modified/deleted on desktop and handheld during each sync operation

Cons:

• Does not support other popular web browsers such as Firefox.

• Some shortcuts will break the ability to HotSync until they are deleted from Internet Explorer
• Cannot automatically add Favorites/bookmarks to the Treo’s Blazer browser
• Cannot prevent selected Favorites from synchronizing

Related Links

Chapura Pocket Favorites Web Site

Filed under: Software reviews