I love simple software programs that are designed to do one thing and accomplish that one thing in beautiful simplicity. TopSignalOnKeyguard was essentially designed to do one thing and one thing only (ok, two things), but placing the signal strength and battery meter on the keyguard display is both a timesaver and very convenient.

Installation & Use

I downloaded TopSignalOnKeyguard on my Centro and to test the program. I wish everything went this smoothly. Once you have the app on your phone, TSOK (it’s such a long name, I’ll just call it TSOK for short) will ask you if you want to hide it its icon from the launcher. Since I couldn’t really think of any reason to have it displayed, I let it hide itself. If you really need to get at it again, you will need a file explorer (I use Resco Explorer, a virtual staple in my Palm OS app library) where you can navigate to the file and relaunch it. I prefer to just keep it hidden because if there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s one more unused icon in my launcher (thanks, Sprint for your bloatware apps, btw.) And that’s it! Brilliant, isn’t it? Now you’re all set to see how much time this can save you.

Performance & Usability

I have to say that on no occasion of testing this application did I think to myself, “I wonder if TSOK is affecting my phone’s performance?” It has a very small footprint (8k) and once you get used to having it, you’ll wonder how you got along without it. There was a small issue that I did have; it seems to act a little wonky (technical term) while using the Pocket Tunes program. The phone itself would not lock up, nor would pTunes, as the music would continue to play and I could still see fragments of the keyguard display screen like a mixed up TSOK/pTunes omelet. You lose all functionality within the pTunes program (the D-Pad essentially becomes unresponsive.) The only way that I have been able to fix this scenario (I’ve reproduced it many times) is to exit out of pTunes and relaunch it. Problem solved. A weird problem, as I have not experienced this with any other program, but nothing more than a minor annoyance.

Conclusion

As I mentioned before, TopSignalOnKeyguard is a very straightforward program that fills a single need, but pulls it off formidably. Aside from the odd issues I experienced while using pTunes, this add-on is a no-brainer. A veritable bargain at $4.95, RNS executes this one perfectly. Now how about some additional plugins for the keyguard? Just saying….

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Criteria  Rating Design 5 Usability 4 Features 5 Cost/Benefit 5 Overall (not an average)	Pros Shows the battery meter and signal strength on the keyguard display Small memory footprint Allows you to hide the app from the launcher
	Cons Seems to affect Pocket Tunes Cannot turn the application Off once it is hidden, you must uninstall