Pocket PCs are capable
INTRODUCTION
of an ever-increasing, amazing panoply of applications
it’s true, but still, 85% of us
(as reported in Spb Software House’s recent survey)
use it primarily to keep tack of our schedule,
contacts, tasks, and notes. With such an
overwhelming majority counting on their PPCs for
Personal Information Management (PIM), you’d think
Microsoft would have concentrated some serious effort
on making PPC PIM top-notch. That’s not the way
Microsoft thinks. Microsoft prefers to provide
entry-level support for most functionalities, allowing
third-parties to develop the state of the art and sell
it to us users. Whatever you think of that
policy, it’s exemplified in the built-in Pocket PC
PIM. For serious PIM work, you’re going to need
an additional program. Why not do what HP did
with its new hx4700 iPAQ and add Pocket Informant?
One of the great things
WHAT’S HOT
about Pocket Informant is that Web Information
Solutions (WebIS) is constantly improving the product.
Pocket Informant has gained and held the top PIM
software position since it was created. The
company absolutely refuses to rest on its laurels. We
last reviewed Pocket Informant at version 5.11.
Since that time,
over 150 enhancements and bug fixes have been made.
The list shows how attentive to detail (and to their
users) WebIS is.
With the latest version,
SETUP
Pocket Informant now has a number of different ways in
which you can install the program: First, there
is a Smart Installer, which is a small file which
connects to the WebIS web site and downloads the
appropriate version of Pocket Informant to install on
your Pocket PC. This is the version that most
people should use. Next, there is a Full Network
installer. This program is huge (8MB in size)
and contains all the language versions of Pocket
Informant. The Full Network Installer is for
people who need to install multiple copies of Pocket
Informant on many Pocket PCs. There is also a
Macintosh OSX Installer. This allows Macintosh
users to install Pocket Informant. It requires
Pocket Mac to function. Finally, you can
download CAB files which will allow you to install
Pocket Informant on a Pocket PC without a desktop
computer.
The download page, on the WebIS site, goes into
further detail.
You can install Pocket Informant to external storage, but
it’s not recommended. Installing Pocket
Informant to a File Store or storage card may slow
down the operation somewhat. Also, depending on
what order your Pocket PC "wakes up" cards, the
hardware buttons might not be able to find Pocket
Informant if you use the Calendar or Contacts key with
PI installed on a storage card.
You can install Pocket Informant right on top of a previous
5.x version without having to uninstall the older one
first. If you do this, the new version will
retain the old versions settings.
There are a few additional elements to the standard
install-via-ActiveSync process for Pocket Informant.
First, you’re asked to select a language:
Pocket Informant
supports all of the languages above
One of the things that all, but particularly non-English, users will notice
in Pocket Informant 5.5 is that a lot of new work has
been done to make the syntax and grammar of the
dialogs, prompts, and other display elements make
sense in each of the supported languages. No
"All your base are belong to us" in this program.
There is also an option
to install "other programs" along with Pocket Informant:
The two trial programs are some of WebIS’ other
software.
PhatNotes Lite is a third-party product that WebIS
provides to add further value to Pocket Informant.
If you elect to install PhatNotes Lite, you’ll find
it’s functionality is very well integrated into Pocket
Informant.
Once the program files
are copied to the Pocket PC, you have some additional choices shown
below:
Pocket Informant’s PPC-side
installation options
The "Set Hardware Buttons to Pocket
Informant" sets the Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks
hardware buttons to call up the
appropriate screens in Pocket Informant rather than
Pocket Outlook, but, if a program calls on the
built-in shortcuts, you’ll still get the Pocket
Outlook programs. Pocket Informant redirects the hardware buttons to
it’s own shortcuts that it installs in a special
folder called "Informant Utils." That folder is
located in the "Programs" folder of the Start Menu.
If you re-organize your Start Menu like I do, don’t
move this folder. If you do, the hardware button
links will break.
"Make Pocket Informant the default PIM" will cause any program that
attempts to call up the built-in PIM software will be
re-directed to Pocket Informant. This is a more
pervasive option and, if you do use it, the only way
to call up the built-in PIM software will be to run
the executables from the Windows folder using File
Explorer.
These two options have been re-worded since the previous
version to make their function more clear.
pocketnow
PROGRAM FEATURES
reviewed version 5.11 of Pocket Informant in
July of this year, but rather than have you have to go
back and read that review again, just to see what has
changed, I’ll highlight any new features with a
icon. Throughout the review, the
display images will be in 320×240 resolution which has
been the standard for Pocket PCs until recently.
Since Pocket Informant fully supports the newer HiDPI
(640×480) resolution, if you click on a display image,
you’ll be able to see the HiDPI screen in all its
glory. Now, on to the program.
Pocket Informant displays five different types of
information in the
calendar, notes, contacts, tasks, and search tabs (
).
You can switch to view the type of information you
want to see by clicking on the corresponding tab.
We’ll begin with the Calendar tab.
Calendar view
Monthly calendar with "status" bars showing when appointments are
scheduled each day
Monthly calendar with "status" bars in landscape orientation
The Calendar view shows appointments and, optionally
tasks in a monthly, weekly, daily, or agenda format.
The icons at the top-left of the screen (
)
allow you to quickly switch to any one of those
formats. The next button over pops up a date
selector screen to allow you to set the calendar view
to a specific date. The button text changes with
every format to reflect that you’re viewing a month,
week, or day. The final two buttons on the top (
)
move backward and forward by one day, week, or month
according to the format you’re using.
The monthly
format is helpful for quickly determining when you can
schedule an appointment in advance. It shows you
all the days in a the current month, in one of four
different ways. You can view "status bars," as
shown above, which indicate when appointments are
scheduled and, by the color, whether the appointments
are marked as out of office, tentative, busy, or free.
You can also optionally show tasks with colors to
indicate overdue, due today, or completed status.
There is another color bar mode which uses colors to
indicate which category the appointments are
associated with. There is also an icon mode,
which shows appointments using the icon which is
associated with it or its category:
Monthly Calendar’s icon
mode
Finally, there is a text
mode, which shows the appointment text. You can show the text
either in a single line or "wrapped" fashion
Monthly Calendar’s text
mode
Monthly Calendar’s text,
wrapped mode
You can quickly switch
to any of these modes using the mode menu on the menu bar at the bottom
of the screen:
Monthly Calendar’s mode
menu
Tapping on the Week icon
(
), on
the top bar, brings up the Weekly calendar:
Weekly calendar
Weekly calendar in landscape orientation
Tapping on the Day icon
(
) brings
up the Daily calendar:
Daily calendar
Daily calendar in
landscape orientation
Tapping on the Agenda
icon (
)
brings up the Agenda calendar:
Agenda calendar in landscape orientation
Pocket Informant offers a number of ways to enter and
edit appointments into the Calendar views: To
move an existing appointment from one date and time to
another, you can simply drag-and-drop it. I use
this feature all the time to reschedule appointments.
You can also tap-and-hold within a date’s space to pop
up the following menu:
The first two options allow you to add a new
appointment or task on the date you tap-and-held on.
The next options switch to other calendar modes.
The next option calls up the date picker to go to a
specific date. The final options send calendar
information over Bluetooth to another handheld or to a
Bluetooth printer.
The final method for adding a new appointment is to
tap the [New] button on the menu bar. Doing this
calls up the Appointment Editing dialog:
Appointment Editing
dialog
At
first glance, Pocket Informant’s appointment editing
dialog will be very familiar to those who’ve used the
built-in Calendar program on their Pocket PC, with
places to enter the appointment information and set up
recurrences. There’s also a tab to add
notes to the appointment. Then things start to
get interesting: There’s a tab (
)
that allows you to link this appointment with the
contact(s) of your choice. When you view the
appointment, you can call up the contact(s)
information with one tap. The next tab (
)
allows you associate categories with this appointment.
Categories can be used in filtering which appointments
display. Categories can also have an icon and a
color associated with them which display in the
appropriate calendar mode. The next tab (
)
allows you to associate another appointment, a task, a
contact, or a data file of any type with this
appointment. This last function is helpful if
you have a document (eg: an Excel spreadsheet, a WMP
video, etc.) to which you’d like to refer during the
appointment. The final tab (
)
associates a "journal" entry with this appointment.
Journal entries allow you to track progress on
projects and the associated phone calls or other
contacts that are made. These entries can be
synchronized with desktop Outlooks journaling
features.
The menu bar in the Appointment Editing dialog holds a
single Edit menu and a set of icons (
).
The icons, respectively, finalize the editing
(creating a new appointment), cancel the editing, call
up a special functions menu, convert this appointment
to a task, delete the appointment, and call up a list
of templates to apply to this appointment. The
special functions menu includes a function to attach
an icon to this appointment (overriding the category’s
icon), beaming the appointment, and saving the
appointment as a template.
Templates allow you to quickly enter information that
is common to many appointments. They also have
some "macro" capabilities. For instance, you can
create a template for "Lunch with client" which will
allow you to enter the client’s name only and, by
applying the template, add "Lunch with" in front of
the name, set the appropriate time and warning alarm,
and even your favorite location.
The Pocket Informant manual is now complete and
includes instructions on creating sophisticated
templates.
The Edit menu has options to create an Alarm Note from
this appointment’s note, to create a Task from this
appointment, to create a contact from this
appointment, and to create another Appointment from
this appointment. It also has the standard cut,
copy, paste, select all, clear all, and undo options.
Returning to the main screen and before we leave the
Calendar view, turn your attention to the series of
icons on the menu bar (
).
The Pocket Informant icon calls up an options menu
that we’ll cover later. Next is the Go to Today
icon, which sets the calendar to show today’s date.
To the right of that is the Entry Bar icon. This
pops up a menu which allows you to add an "ABC Tab"
bar, to quickly locate an appointment using its
beginning letters, a "New Entry" bar, to quickly enter
a new appointment without using the Appointment
Editing dialog, a "Search" bar, to quickly locate an
appointment by finding some text within it, or no
toolbar at all. The next icon calls up the view
configuration menu:
The view configuration menu decides what types of
items are displayed and how they are displayed.
You can filter the display, based on the status (busy,
free, out of office, tentative, or all) of the
appointments. You can change how many days are
displayed and whether "empty" days are displayed in
the Agenda view. You can select how many minutes
make one section on the Day view. You can select
how many days make up your "week," what orientation
you want to show them in, and set the first day of the
week in the Week view. You can set the starting
day of the month, and select where the detail displays
in the Month view. You can choose whether tasks
appear in each of the views, whether completed, or
undated tasks appear, and how tasks are sorted.
You can choose a display "style," which changes the
appearance of the display elements. Finally, you
can display only Birthdays, Anniversaries, Holidays,
recurring events, or all events.
The next icon to the right is the mode menu icon.
It calls up the menu that allows you to switch to bar,
icon, and text displays as we’ve seen previously.
The star-shaped icon calls up the Custom View Menu:
The first two options on the Custom View menu
show your Journal and Calendar entries respectively in
the Search View. You can then use the
capabilities of the Search view to locate a specific
entry.
The next open allows you to save the current view (all of the
settings that affect how entries are displayed on the
calendar) as a custom view. The next option
calls up a list of available custom views and allows
you to choose one or delete any you no longer need.
At the bottom of the Custom View menu is a list of the
available custom views so you can quickly switch to
the one you want.
The final icon on the Calendar view is the Filter
control. Filters allow you to select a set of
categories and only display items which are associated
with those categories. This would allow you to,
for instance, view only work-related appointments
during work hours and then switch to personal and
family appointments at the end of your work day.
Clicking on the funnel icon pops up the category list,
allowing you to select which notes, associated with
those categories, you want to display. You can
also filter on "No category" to display only notes not
assigned to a category or turn off the filter to
display all notes. If you click on the up-arrow,
you’ll get a menu that will allow you to select a
previously defined filter or no filter.
Notes view
Notes, showing the
contents of AlarmNotes in My Documents (in Main
Memory)
Notes in
landscape orientation
The notes tab has changed quite a bit from
the previous version. Earlier versions simply listed all
the available notes in a single list. The
current version has a hierarchical list: The
first level is the storage locations. Beneath
each storage location is a list of folders on that
medium.
If you tap-and-hold on a folder in the list, you’ll be
able to set it as the "default" folder, where new
notes will automatically be placed unless you specify
otherwise. Beneath that is a list of files in the
folder. Each level can be opened to reveal the
level beneath it or closed to hide it. As with
previous versions, clicking on the file will show a
preview in the pane on the bottom half of the screen.
The menu bar in Notes (
)
has some of the same elements as the Calendar.
The Pocket Informant icon calls up the options menu.
The double arrow icon determines whether the ABC Tab
bar, the New Entry Bar, the Search Bar, or no bar at
all is displayed at the top of the screen. The
tape icon toggles on and off the Voice Bar (
).
The Voice Bar allows you to record and playback a
sound file. This could be a voice memo or it
could be your voice or
a sound you want to use as an alarm. To use it
as an alarm, you tap-and-hold on the alarm file to
call up an options menu. In that menu is an
option to play the sound at a particular time and date
along with popping up the alarm dialog box.
The next icon calls up the Notes Configuration menu:
The Notes Configuration menu allows you to sort the
notes lists by name, size, category, time of last
modification or creation, or alarm time; either
descending or ascending order. You can also
elect to show hidden folders (folders that are marked
not to appear in File Explorer) and to make all
entries a single line.
Following the configuration menu is the Filter menu.
As with filters in the Calendar, clicking on the
funnel icon pops up the category list, allowing you to
select which notes, associated with those categories,
you want to display. If you click on the
up-arrow, you’ll get a menu that will allow you to
select a previously defined filter or no filter.
PhatNotes / PhatPad
Integration
PhatWare’s
PhatNotes and
PhatPad are now fully integratable into Pocket
Informant. As you saw in the Setup section, PI
now even comes with a free copy of PhatNotes Lite
which can be installed at the same time as PI.
PhatNotes and PhatPad add a number of features to the
basic note-taking capabilities of Pocket Informant,
but you’ll only have to run those programs if you want
access to the more advanced features. Notes
created by those programs will show in the Preview
window and you can create, edit, delete, duplicate,
and rename the notes directly within Pocket Informant.
To call up the advanced features, you can tap-and-hold
on a note and select "Edit in PhatNotes" (or "Edit in
PhatPad") from the pop-up menu.
Task View
Tasks,
grouped by Categories, in portrait orientation
Tasks, in landscape orientation
The task screens above show a feature of Pocket Informant
that I find very handy: You can group
tasks according to categories or a number of other
criteria. If you’re a person who wears several
hats during work hours, task grouping really helps to
hone in on the appropriate tasks for you to be working
on at the moment. The Task Grouping menu below
shows all the options:
At the top of the menu are the options to expand or
collapse all the task groups or hierarchies.
Below that is the option that enables you
to create "hierarchical tasks." Hierarchical
tasks have sub-tasks, subordinate to a parent task.
There are two caveats to using hierarchical tasks:
First, Pocket Informant currently doesn’t check
hierarchical tasks to prevent checking off the parent
when a child task is still unchecked. It also
won’t automatically check the parent off when all the
children are completed. The information about the hierarchy is only stored
within Pocket Informant. Desktop Outlook, with
which you sync, will know nothing about the
hierarchies you’ve set up and synchronizing can split the hierarchy into its separate tasks
again.
There’s another option for appointments that isn’t
obvious from the dialog boxes and screens:
Pocket Informant now has the ability to create
"regenerating tasks." A regenerating task will
re-created itself a specified time after the task has
been marked completed. This is a great option
for tasks that don’t reoccur on a set schedule. It can
also be used to speed up the Pocket PC’s performance.
"How?" you ask. One reason a Pocket PC will slow
down is if you have a lot of repeating events,
particularly if those events are reoccurring from some
date a bit distant in the past. The PPC has to
calculate forward to properly place the reoccurring
task. With regenerating tasks, the task doesn’t
appear to be reoccurring as far as the PPC is
concerned. Each time you mark it as completed,
it generates a copy of itself on a specific date and
time after the interval you set. The PPC doesn’t
have to figure forward as it does with reoccurring
tasks.
In
Tasks, he menu bar holds icons (
)
that are, by now, well recognized. The Pocket
Informant icon calls up the Options menu, the double
arrow allows you to show the ABC Tab Bar, the New
Entry Bar, the Search Bar, or no bar at all. The
Group icon calls up the Task Grouping menu we’ve just
seen. The Configuration icon calls up the Tasks
Configuration menu:
The Tasks Configuration menu allows you to view all
tasks, tasks in progress, tasks that start or end
today
or today and tomorrow, overdue, undated, or completed
tasks, or tasks that start or are due on a specific
date. You can also filter tasks based on high,
normal, or low importance. You can include
completed and/or undated tasks in the display.
You can sort by two separate criteria. Finally
you can control whether start date, due date,
priorities, category, and completion date are
displayed, whether the display is single line,
compact, or expanded format, whether a status bar
displays and whether it displays task count informant
or task breakdown information. You can also
enable and disable drag-and-drop operations.
Back on the Menu bar, the Custom View icon calls up
the Custom View menu, with the Journal List and
Calendar List and any saved views as options.
The Filter icon calls up the Filter Selection dialog
and the up-arrow next to it allows you to select saved
filters or turn off the filter.
Contacts view
Contacts
Contacts in
landscape orientation
At
first glance, Contacts appears to be pretty much the
same as the built-in version. That appearance is
deceptive. There’s a lot more power "under the
hood." For instance tapping-and-holding on a
contact, brings up this context menu:
This "context" menu allows you to edit the contact,
even quickly switching to a specific tab in the
Contact Editing dialog. You can also dial the
contact using you choice of any of the stored
phone/cell numbers for that contact. Pocket
Informant supports dialing using standard "touch
tones" (DTMF), the iPAQ Bluetooth dialer, and IR port,
serial cable, or serial on USB to a cellular phone.
You can also indicate that the contact is you for
purposes of filling in e-mail and messaging
information. You can duplicate and delete the
contact. You can use Bluetooth to send the
contact to a different device, dial any of the
contacts phone/cellular number, or Print it on a
Bluetooth-enabled printer. You can attach an
icon to the contact. You can created an
Appointment, task, or another contact with the
appointment. You can save the company
information as a template for later use.
Finally, you can "beam" the appointment to another
device.
The by now mostly recognizable menu bar for Contacts (
)
holds the Pocket Informant icon that calls up the
Options menu, the double-arrow that allows you to
select the ABC Tab Bar, the New Entry Bar, the Search
Bar, or no toolbar at all, and the Configuration icon
that calls up the Contacts Configuration menu:
The Contacts Configuration menu allows you to select
how dialing is done (DTMF, Bluetooth dialer, IR,
serial, or USB), remove phone numbers and/or e-mail
addresses from the list display, use standard or
compact list display, and sort the contacts by First
name/Last name, Last name/First name, Company,
Category, or the "File As" entry.
Returning to the Contacts menu bar, the Custom View
icon and Filter icon work in exactly the same fashion
as they do in Calendar and Notes.
Tapping on the [New] button on the menu bar or
selecting other options throughout Pocket Informant
that create a new contact calls up the Contact Editing
dialog:
Contacts Editing dialog
Arrayed below the main input section are a series of
tabs (
).
These tabs, respectively, call up the General,
Business, Home, Other Info, Notes, Categories, Links,
and Journal screens. Pocket Informant supports
the entire range of entries available in the built-in
Contacts application and adds the ability to link to
other PIM information or data files or journal
entries. As you may have noticed in the screen
above, you can also associate a picture with the
contact. In fact, you can also associate a
picture with a company. That way, if you don’t
have a picture for each individual contact, the
company logo or picture will display.
Search view
Search
Search in
landscape orientation
The Search view is one of the most power features in
Pocket Informant. As you can see from the above,
it supports "wildcard" characters to allow searches on
partial text, but that’s only the beginning. The
Search String Entry panel (
) allows you to enter text
to search for. The icons to the left of the text
entry box search for any entry ending in the text, any
entry containing the text, and clear the search entry
and display. The green down-arrow at the right
of the text entry box performs the search.
The panel just below the Search String Entry panel (
)
determines which types of PIM information is searched.
Clicking on each of the icons toggles on and off
inclusion in the search.
At
the bottom of the Search screen, the menu bar (
) holds
a new icon and a few other surprises. The Pocket
Informant icon calls up the Options menu as you’d
expect. The [@] button calls up a list of
special characters:
Since these characters are especially useful in
searches and not easily available on some input
methods, this special character entry menu is a great
feature. The Configuration icon calls up the
Search Configuration menu:
The Search Configuration menu allows you to choose the
sort order for items to display and whether that order
is descending or ascending. The "Parameters"
option exposes some more of the real power behind
Search in the Parameters dialog:
The Parameters dialog lets you select whether the
search will be applied to All fields, or Location,
Subject and Names, First Name, Last Name, Company,
Email, or Phone/Cellular numbers. You can also
elect to display Private, Non-Private, or both types
of entries and Complete, Incomplete, or both types of
tasks.
The "Soundex" option allows you to use "sounds like"
technology for contacts. Soundex allows you to
find all names that sound similar to the name you
actually enter so you don’t have to be concerned with
spelling it exactly right. This is an amazingly
handy feature, especially for the spelling-challenged.
The remaining options allow you to search notes and to
specify a range of dates for tasks, appointments, and
contact-related dates.
There’s no built-in help
HELP SUPPORT
file for Pocket Informant. Normally, I’d have an
issue with that, but with the huge feature set, I can
see why they chose to go the manual route. The
PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format manual is automatically
installed on your desktop system when you install PI.
If you have a PDF viewer on your Pocket PC, you can
transfer the manual to your PPC if you need it while
you’re away from your desktop. The manual is
well written and extensive. It’s dated November
of this year so it’s also very current. In addition to the
manual, there’s also on-line support. There’s a
set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). You
can also make a specific support request via e-mail or
using
a web-based support page. There’s an
official
customer support forum but, as I’ve noted, Alex
Kac also makes the rounds of other forums and is
pretty quick to respond to PI-related issues.
As
OPTIONS
I mentioned earlier, you can also install the included
copy of
PhatNotes Lite along with Pocket Informant.
PhatNotes adds a number of additional capabilities to
PI’s Notes view and is very well integrated into
Pocket Informant.
There is also two "hidden" options:
The first allows you to change the "Types" which
appear when you create a Journal entry. The File
containing these types is "My DocumentsWebISJournalTypes.reg"
Despite the extension, it’s actually a text file which
can be edited using any text editor to create your own
journal types.
The second hidden option allows you to
move your Pocket Informant folder once the program has
been installed. This will allow you to free up
RAM for other programs to use. Look
here for more information.
You may find additional tweaks and hidden options on
the Pocket Informant Forum on the WebIS web site.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Pocket Informant 5.5 works on Pocket PC 2002 and
Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PCs, including 2003 Second
Edition with full landscape and HiDPI display support.
Pocket Informant requires 3.03MB of program memory and
just over 1.79MB of storage memory including all the
graphics sets.
BUGS AND WISHES
I’ve only noticed one bug in the program: It
only appears when you’re using the Monthly Calendar,
displaying status or category bars while in landscape
orientation. When you click on a day within the
month to display the detail panel, the calendar
display has to squish to the top. As it does so,
the PM portion of the color bars disappears. You
can see the effect below:
Monthly calendar with
status bars
Without the detail pane, everything appears
Monthly calendar with
status bars
With the detail pane, the bars for the second half of
the day disappear
Referring back to
our earlier review, I had reported this same but
then. It’s surprising to see it hasn’t been
fixed yet as quick to respond as WebIS has been.
I also noted an issue with having to scroll the
dialogs when using landscape orientation. I’m
actually withdrawing that complaint because it has
more to do with how Microsoft has implemented the
input panel (In portrait it takes up less than 1/4 of
the screen. In landscape, it takes nearly half!)
I also mentioned some wishes from
our review of version 5.0. First, was the
concern that Pocket Informant needs to be loaded into
RAM and it takes up a fair bit. This has been
partially addressed with a tweak I mentioned in the
Options section. The second issue was that the
manual was not yet complete and didn’t cover
Templates. With this latest version, WebIS has
released a complete manual that cover Templates as
well as all the other PI features.
PURCHASING
Pocket Informant 5.11 is available at
the pocketnow Store for $29.95. The upgrade
is free for owners of version 5.x and half-price for
owners of version 4.x. More information on
upgrading is available
here. There is also a half-price upgrade
available for owners of the HP hx4700 iPAQ (which
comes with Pocket Informant in ROM). More
information on that upgrade is available
here. There is also
a trial version available. The trial version
is the same as the complete retail version. It
simply times out in 15 days unless you enter a
registration key.
PROS
- Full
HiDPI support - Full
portrait and landscape orientation support - Huge
feature set - Intuitive,
user-friendly interface - Constant
improvement - Customer
support second to none
CONS
- Color bars
disappear when the detail pane is called up - The
program is large and needs to loaded into RAM
(Partially addressed with an add-on utility)
One of the most important "features"
OVERALL
IMPRESSION
is not in the programming, but in the responsiveness
of WebIS to customer comments and questions.
Because of that, Pocket Informant keeps getting better
at an accelerated pace. Since my last review, a
lot of the enhancements that were made look "cosmetic" at first, but the
primary functionality of PIM is to enter and view
information and all of these changes improve
usability.
I said this in my last review, but
it bears repeating: Pocket Informant is the
first program I load on any new Pocket PC I get and
the one I use the most throughout the day. It’s
such a useful enhancement to the built-in PIM programs
that HP is now building it into the ROM of its
flagship hx4700 model iPAQ.
If you rely on your Pocket PC at all for Personal Information
Management, you owe it to yourself to download PI
right away. After you’ve tried it for a few
days, you’ll recognize the purchase price is a great
bargain for the host of features you’ll get.
All screenshots in this
review are taken using
SOTI’s Pocket Controller Pro
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