Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

It's always remained a Psion trademark to only password protect Word and Sheet files. This is possibly something to do with the file formats involved, but the average user has always found it frustrating not being able to password protect or encrypt Data or Agenda files, which are just as likely to contain sensitive information.

The solution on the 3a/3c was one of Phil Spencer's handy utilities. But if your sensitive file wasn't in Data or Agenda format you'd again be stuck. For example, I used to have several sensitive long documents in reader format, and the only security option I ever found was to use the little known Kodtoto, and that only worked in french!

Anyway, Series 5 owners can be fully-protected, with Peter Csutora's Encrypt-it!, written in very fast C++. This takes any file and applies either low or high security encryption keys in order to scramble it beyond the retrieval skills of any hacker. I've been looking at v2.0, downloaded from the Palmscape web site.

The utility is fully working, with just a token nag screen, and seems to work very well indeed. Using either the 'memory-friendly' RC-4WA option (which should be enough for most people) or the 'memory-hog' SK-128 'safer' option, my 60k test DATA file took a mere three seconds to encrypt! Once encrypted, the file is shown on the Series 5 screen as an Encrypt-it! document, so that tapping twice on the icon will launch the utility and perform the decryption automatically, Even better still, Encrypt-it! knows which application originally created the file and launches it for you! The links with VReader5 are particularly strong and the two work well together.

On a roll, the program then detects when you close the document and helpfully comes to the foreground and encrypts it back up. All very clever, and the only snag I could think of was not being able to cancel an encryption or decryption operation once started. Still, that's probably a good thing if I want to avoid half-scrambled files...

Encrypt-it!'s main interface is a simple dialog, but there are buttons for help and preferences and everything's easily to hand. An extremely powerful addition to the Series 5 arsenal, Encrypt-it! deserves to do well. It does exactly what it claims to very quickly, without getting in the way of routine operations too much.

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