• $9.99 until Feb 15 then $19.99

• Superb Image Quality and Size
• Full Clie Support
• Supports EXIF thumbnails and data

• Few Bells and Whistles
• Poor image Panning
• No 8 bit colour support

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JpegWatch
By Edward Green
2/05/2002

Overview
JpegWatch is a Image viewer that will read industry standard Jpeg files straight from a VFS memory card.

Another Picture Viewer?
There is no shortage of image viewers available for Palm OS handhelds; many devices include an image viewer out of the box. However the majority of viewers require the user to convert their original image into a application specific format, offering low compression and no compatibility with viewers on colleges or friends handhelds, let alone other devices. In the world of desktop computers their are a smaller number of image formats readable by a range of applications, Jpeg being the compressed format commonly used for Photographs. With JpegWatch this universal format is accessible directly from a Palm OS device. JpegWatch supports VFS devices from Palm and Sony as well as Handspring devices using MemPlug springboards.

Installing and Managing Images
JpegWatch comes with a desktop application which will convert a wider range of image formats into Jpeg and modify them to suit your device, handling whole batches of files in one operation. It is very easy to select the contents of an entire directory and re-size all the images to 320x320 or 160x160.
Installing the Jpegs onto your handhel's memory card is pretty straight forward. You can either use Palm Desktop 4.0's Install tool, which will automatically create an Image directory on your memory card, or on the Clie you can simply use MS Import and drag the files into a folder of your choice. JpegWatch doesn't mind where you place the images, as it has a full file explorer, although helpfully you can set a default directory.
Once installed JpegWatch allows images to be viewed, deleted and for notes to be attached. These are saved in a separate .txt file with the same name as the image. Image details saved by EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) Digital Cameras are also available, providing data on the source camera, flash usage, focal length and much more. Sharing images with other JpegWatch users is also straightforward, even if they use a different card format as images can be beamed and received between handhelds.

Image Size
A 16 bit 320x320 image in a Palm format will normally take up about 190k on a memory card. The same file as a Jpeg will typically take up under 50k. There is however a small trade off, in that JpegWatch takes a little time to decompress and display the image For a 320x320 image that time is only a couple of seconds, however a 1600x1200 image from a digital camera can take ten times that to process. Neatly JpegWatch supports the EXIF thumbnails which many digital cameras encode into the images they produce, which means you can flick through a set of images without having to decode the Jpegs. JpegWatch doesn't provide a multiple thumbnail gallery like many other image viewers, but this would probably be slow due to the decompression required.

Image Quality
Image quality at 320x320 in 16 bit color is superb, but image quality on low resolution devices is good as well. JpegWatch supports both 16 bit color and dithered 4 bit gray devices; it doesn't support 8bit color on the Sony n710c. Once the image is loaded you can scale the image from twice to one eighth scale, and if the image is larger than the physical screen you can pan by dragging the stylus across the screen. Unfortunately JpegWatch then has to redecode the whole screen area, rather than smoothly scrolling the whole image as other viewers offer.
JpegWatch does offer full RGB brightness control, allowing you to lighten dark images, or compensate for a displays colour shift. This setting is universal and effects all images rather than the adjustments being attached to a certain image.
The images can be set to display as a slide show, although the decompression time of larger images isn't ideal for this purpose. JpegWatch can also be controlled remotely by the N7x0's series audio controller, ideal for presentations.

Conclusion
As an Image Viewer JpegWatch lags behind other products in terms of bells and whistles, however many of these shortcomings are due to the use of the Jpeg image format. Here JpegWatch comes into its own. For those users who are always running out of memory JpegWatch allows you to store as many as ten times the number of images in the same space. Images can be transferred directly via a memory card reader from and to other devices without conversion, making it an ideal solution for Digital Photographers.
For those users who want a picture of their significant other, the kids and the dog one of other the image viewers may be a better bet. Personally I could never go back to using PDB based image viewers. JpegWatch is a professional and powerful solution.