Sunday, August 1, 1999

Instant conversions for world travelers

.KEYWORD conversions
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Instant conversions for world travelers
.OTHER
.SUMMARY If you’re a frequent world traveler, going on a trip to a foreign land, or work with foreign currencies a lot, then Conversions In Hand should prove to be a godsend. In this upbeat review, senior technical editor Jason Perlow shows you how to get from dollars to yen, gallons to liters, and miles to kilometers. If he could only tell us which way to Albuquerque.
.AUTHOR Jason Perlow
If you’re a frequent world traveler, going on a trip to a foreign land, or work with foreign currencies a lot, then Conversions In Hand, shown in Figure A, should prove to be a godsend.

.FIGPAIR A Just tap and convert your way from one unit to another.

Conversions In Hand supports over 200 types of conversions including weights and measures. Plus, it has a built-in calculator. With point and tap ease, it’s simple to change miles to kilometers, gallons to liters, US dollars to French francs or German marks, Italian liras, Japanese yen, or even European Currency Units — whatever you are trying to calculate.

.H1 Update using Mobile Channels
What’s ingenious about this currency calculator is that current exchange information can be downloaded into it using a Mobile Channel (which requires using the free Microsoft Mobile Channel viewer on H/PC’s). This way, you can be sure you’re up to date with the latest exchange rates, provided that you have a desktop PC to sync with.

.H1 Easy customization
If you go back and forth to a certain country often or live in a nation where you have to commonly convert to another currency (say, the US Dollar), you can customize the conversion tab layout to place your frequently used conversion types into the most easily accessible location.

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.H1 Product availability and resources
Conversions In Hand by Burr Oak Software is available at http://www.burroak.on.ca/cih.html.
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.BIO Jason Perlow is Senior Technical Editor with Windows CE Power. When he’s not scouring the Web for great Windows CE utilities and programs, he can be reached at perlow@hotmail.com.