Bankarama by Threedef

First we looked at SplashMoney ($29.95) and found it to be a very useful means to track your financial information. Now we turn our sites on Bankarama ($21.95) by ThreeDef. While Bankarama doesn’t provide online access to your financial institution, it claims to be optimized for everyday use with quick and easy transaction entry. Read on to see how Bankarama measures up on the financial application front.

Installation of Banarama on to the Treo Pro was uneventful and once you start the application, you immediately go into an account setup wizard. You enter the account name, balance and whether or not you want to describe every transaction.

From there the interface is fairly straight forward. You select deposit or withdraw by using the four-way controller and enter the amount of the transaction. From there you can hit enter on the keypad to enter details about the transaction. On-screen directions appear should you tap on the “deposit” or “withdraw” that appears at the bottom of the screen to guide you through the entry process.

Bankarama has the ability to track up to twenty different accounts, export registries to Excel and can be password protected. This is a stand alone application that doesn’t allow access to online banking or synchronization with a desktop application.

While it’s a very basic financial application, Bankarama does come with a few quircks. While marketed for Windows Mobile Pro it did not run with any resemblance of consistency on the Treo Pro. This may be a compatibility issue with the Pro or simply a programming issue with Bankarama.

Another issue I had with the application was that you couldn’t see all the details in the transaction entry and the pages wouldn’t adjust to the screen size, causing a left/right scroll bar to appear. There were no customization options to adjust the display to your devices screen size or increase the size of each transaction field.

While transaction entry could be accomplished quickly, it was easy to enter the transaction without any details. This would require you to go back and edit the transaction to add the details defeating any efficiency the application was designed to have.

Overall Impression

On the surface, Bankarama ($21.95) had a lot of promise. It’s presented as a straightforward, simple financial application. In using Bankarama, I found it to have stability issues and maybe a little too simple.

There’s no budgeting or report capabilities, no online access to your financial institution, and no customization options. While I liked how you could initiate a transaction by typing in the amount, if you aren’t careful, you’ll enter only the amount with no details. I also like the on screen help guides to remind you the steps in entering transactions.

While your needs for a financial application may not need the online abilities of SplashMoney and you prefer the simplicity of a stand alone application such as Bankarama, I would highly recommend downloading the trial version first to see if it meets your needs and if there’s any stability issues with your WM device.