SlideshowToGo 7 was the first PalmOS program that could display native PowerPoint files. DataViz sent us its successor for review-and indeed, it works well. We tested it on a Tungsten T3 with this PowerPoint presentation.
The UI of the application still is file-centric. This makes usage easier, but gets confusing if you have more than a few presentations. PalmOne handhelds with Files are said to have a file dialog as well(click images for bigger versions):
SlideShowToGo has three rendering modes. Textual rendering displays the slide’s text in a tree-ish form. Multi-column slides and bulleted text are displayed perfectly, but text in tables is lost:
Mini rendering shows the full slide on the screen. It works well, and the text is really clear-a significant improvement over version 7:
Last but not least, there is zoomed rendering. In this mode, slides are shown in ‘full size:
Gif and JPEG images are displayed in 8bit mode(click images for huge bitmaps):
Complex tables are no problems:
Equation editor is no problem:
Our visio example wasn’t rendered fully-but it was o.k.
The editing functionality is decent-you can add slides and modify existing text.
Files are opened pretty fast-you usually don’t have to wait more than 10 seconds for a slide. We had one crash that killed the entire suite for good-but it worked well again after opening a file via VersaMail.
Overall, this program takes the fear out of PowerPoint. Native files can be opened decently fast. Slides are rendered in a pretty complete fashion, the content is displayed well. We experienced one major crash, but I beleive that this was just bad luck. SlideshowToGo 8 is a good powerpoint viewer-if you receive many presentations on the go, purchase it!
