The Web IS Pocket Informant Review

Posted by: Judie on Jul 29 2007

There was a time when I used a Palm device exclusively.   The PIM applications on it were so anemic, however, I was forced to find replacement programs for all of them. My favorite aftermarket software titles were DateBk, Contacts, Memo Plus, and ToDo Plus. Realizing that I felt the need to replace every single built-in PIM on my Palm device seems as funny now as it seemed necessary then, but I did it and was quite happy with the results.

When I started using a Pocket PC, I was more satisfied with the built-in PIMs than I had ever been with their Palm counterparts, but I had grown used to customizing every possible Datebook and Contact setting, and I wanted to be able to do the same on my Pocket PC.  In late 2000, I tried Pocket Informant for the first time, and I liked what it allowed me to do. Don’t get me wrong, the program wasn’t perfect, but I liked it better than the competition, and it allowed much more customization than the built-in Calendar did; it even had one of the features I had liked so much in DateBk…category icons. Yeah, I was stylin’.

In June 2001, I attended the MS Mobility Tour & PPC FanFest in Dallas. While there I met Alex Kac, the developer behind the then current Pocket Informant2 version. While working the "Beam & Share" booth at the FanFest together, he and I had an opportunity to talk about what I did and didn’t like about the current incarnation of his program. Amidst the praise, one of my criticisms was that, "I had just about given up on [Pocket Informant 2] because it seemed so slow!! It really bothered me that if I made an entry it seemed to take forever for the program to refresh so that it could display the updated screen." I also groused about what I felt was a "missing" Today plugin. At the time, Alex was readying his release of PI3, and he told me that a lot of the issues I was experiencing would be addressed in that version. With the exception of the Today plugin, Alex totally came through.

When I wrote about PI3 in April 2002, there were ten selling points that I felt warranted mentioning: The multi-day agenda view; the ability to create notes with alarms; category icons in the Calendar; the ability to view formatted notes in Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Tasks; the upgraded Task manager; the ability to dial a number from Contacts and Tasks; Multi-frame windows in Tasks, Contacts, Calendar, Notes; a plethora of program-wide customization options; and the program’s near instantaneous refresh. In 2002, PI3 required 1.3MB.

For those of you that noticed the April 2002 review date, and the fact that I mentioned "the ability to dial a number from Contacts" - you may be shaking your head and wondering what the heck I was talking about, since Pocket PC Phone Editions weren’t really on the scene until late 2002. Well the thing was that if you wanted to save yourself the "trouble of dialing a number by hand, you [could] look it up in PI, hold your PPC to the phone, and it [would] be dialed for you." Hey, this was pretty cool stuff back then, and PI7 can still do that!

So here we are in 2007, six years and several major revisions of Pocket Informant later. Web IS  has recently released Pocket Informant 7 (Rev 4 Build 869), which is the version I will be reviewing. PI7 requires 3145KB, which is a very memory intensive number. The good news is that PI can be installed to (and will run properly from) external memory. My intention for this review is not to rewrite the 86 page PI7 Manual; if you need the detailed information a full user’s guide would provide, then you would do better to go ahead and read it. However, I would like to go over some of the program’s highlights and talk about some of the newest features.

Let me mention here that although PI7 supports QVGA, VGA, Square Screen, and Landscape video modes, I believe that it is best used and viewed on a PDA with a VGA screen. This review was conducted on the HTC Advantage, which has a very speedy 624MHz processor, as well as the gloriously huge VGA screen you’ll see in the accompanying pictures.

According to the Web IS site, on top of all the previous features, PI7 also has 13 new improvements. But there is something else to consider here, too. In the last seven years, the built-in PIM applications on the Pocket PC have also improved; some of the missing features that made me need a third-party application in the first place, are no longer MIA. We’ll talk about that a bit as we go. I’ve added my comments in italicized blue:

• Included Today Plugin  - Now includes a basic efficient appointment/task list Today plugin that integrates with Pocket Informant and supports category colors Yay - I’ve been waiting for this!
• Automatic Custom Views and Categories - Setup your custom views or categories to automatically come on at work hours, off work hours, or a custom weekend/weekday time This almost seems too organized to me, I mean isn’t that basically what segregating items into categories is for in the first place? If you don’t want to see work related tasks, then you can filter them out. This is possible with WM6.
• Find all Appointments using this Contact - Quickly list all appointments that have the selected appointment setup for meetings.
• Contact Searches - Pocket Informant searches contact names quickly and shows you what part of the word was found via highlighting. Windows Mobile 5 & 6 both already do this.
• Daily Notes - Automatic Rich Text Daily Journal which can sync with PlanPlus for Outlook 4.0 This might be handy for those of you that use your PDA for journaling.
• Franklin Covey PlanPlus 4.0 - Daily, Master, and Project Task lists which work either with or without PlanPlus for Outlook 4.0 on the desktop.
• Task Projects - Tasks View’s Projects let you create parent tasks, child tasks, and have the parent tasks inherit its child tasks’ completion percentage and due dates.
• Task Percentage/Status - Assign tasks a status of Normal/Complete/In Process (w/percent complete)/Delegate lets you visualize progress of tasks. Windows Mobile 5 and 6 let you see task start and due dates, but not a percentage - like you can see in Outlook. This might be a handy feature for those that keep up with percentages.
• Complete One Handed Soft Key support - Every feature accessible from your hardware soft keys. Or choose the classic menubars if you prefer. Perfect for Treo and other Pocket PC smartphones! Rev 3 dramatically improves one handed support in the editors, Month View, Week View, and Custom Views, Category Editor, and more! I used to be all about the one-handed entry; because I entered information on my Treo while driving. Watch out world!! Now that I have the Mogul, that has virtually stopped.
• Revamped Journal with Rich Text and new fields - Create entries for meetings, phone calls, and more. Auto-journal events such as marking tasks complete or creation. Four journal timer macros. Sync to desktop Outlook I don’t need this; I consider myself to be very organized, but this level of anal surpasses mine; I bow to it.
• New Contacts Summary - Revamped Contacts Summary with Call Logs (Phone Edition devices only) bringing one handed dialing, better readability, and live access via Preview. Windows Windows Mobile 6 does this.
• Multiple Alarms, Travel Appointments - Beyond the primary alarm, you can now add secondary alarms, notifications and travel appointments to new and existing appointments Does this mean multiple alarms for the same appointment? I just create a new entry in my Calendar…but then, I am old school like that.
• New Date Picker - Now supports keyboard navigation and better user feedback Sounds good!
• Exchange GAL - On Windows Mobile 5 AKU2 devices you can use the Online Exchange GAL to select attendees and add to your Contacts list.
• Timezones - Create new appointments in their timezone easily. This sounds like it would be a very helpful feature for business travelers.

In all honesty, I don’t need most of the new features, but a few of them sound helpful. Since there is no option of deleting portions of the program that I don’t need, it all gets loaded…along with all of the existing features (once again with my comments in italicized blue):

• Five Powerful Views: Appointments, Tasks, Notes, Contacts, and Search views. Appointment view broken into Agenda, Day, Week, Month, and Timeline Views. WM5 and WM6 both have appropriate programs for the views listed, and there are five Appointment views in WM6: Agenda, Day, Week, Month, and Year.
• Category Icons: Each category can have its own icon (company logos, avatars, or objects) to help you visualize your appointments, tasks, or contacts visually. Show them in your Month View for a great visualization of your schedule! This is a feature that I used to really like, but I haven’t bothered with in several years.
• Category Color: Assign categories to your items and have their text or background colored. View Month bars and timebars throughout the Appointment views showing your schedule in color! I do like this feature a lot. Assigning a color to a category seems a lot more "grown up" than giving it an icon.
• Groupings: Group Tasks by completion, progress, priority, importance, category, and Date. Group Contacts by Company, Department, City, State, Country, and Category. WM6 Tasks allows filtering by recently viewed, categories, active, and completed. It allows sorting by status, priority, subject, start date and due date. There aren’t quite as many choices, but certainly enough to filter to my satisfaction. 
• Sorting: Sort your tasks with two levels of sort - Sort By and Then By. All fields sortable both in Calendar Tasks and Tasks View. Use Grouping for a pseudo third sort. This is a handy feature
• Drag and Drop throughout: Drag and Drop operation in every view - Drag appointments from one day to the next or within the same day to change its time. Drag items to link them. Drag tasks to convert to appointments and vice versa. I like being able to do this in Outlook; being able to do it on my PDA is pretty slick, too.
• Month View Zoom: Select a handful of days, weekends, weekdays, or just a portion of your month. Get more detailed text, icons, or bars Another very slick feature.
• Custom Views: Save your common settings for any view and bring it back with a tap of a menu or hardware key. Save a search, a filter, ANYTHING. This is very necessary because there are so many options available in PI’s setup, that once you have got it tweaked just as you want it to be, losing these settings would be frustrating.
  - Category Filtering: Filter the displayed data by an advanced category filter user interface. You can do this with the built-in WM6 PIM, too.
• PhatWare Notes/Pad: Pocket Informant’s Notes View supports both native Windows Mobile Notes and PhatWare’s PhatPad and PhatNotes I know, I am the last person on the planet to use this program…but I still don’t.
• Links: Link between tasks, appointments, and tasks. View links in a popup window or in the summary dialogs This is a slick feature, and I have liked it ever since PI added it.
• Localized: American and International English, Czech, Dutch, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Portuguese (Both Brazilian and Portugal), German, Italian, Russian, Polish This is great if you speak a language other than English.
• MyText with Contact Macros: Quickly enter preset text with data pulled live from an existing contact or the current time/date. I can honestly say that I have never used this feature.
• Search View: Search View brings together every bit of PIM information on your device: Appointments, Tasks, Contacts, Notes, Journals. Search with wildcards, on a specific field, with certain dates, and within PIM item notes This search is very thorough and it used to blow away the built in WM search. However, I think that the WM5 and WM6 Search function is just as good.
• Assign Ringtones: On a Windows Mobile 5 Phone Edition device you can assign a custom ringtone to a contact You can already do this with WM5 & 6.
• FlexMail Integration: Send Emails and SMS messages (phone edition only) through FlexMail 2007
• Rich Text: Enter Rich Text notes for all PIM types You still can’t enter rich text notes directly onto your PDA, although they are displayed as Rich Text if entered as such through Outlook.

As I look at the existing features list, I realize that I don’t really use that many of them, either. Am I using my PDA’s PIMs less than I used to? Certainly not. If anything I am using them more, but many of these features are just not things I need. Nevertheless, PI7 can be tweaked from within to look how I want, display what I want, and be less complicated than the list of features would lead one to believe.

After installation is complete, one of the first noticeable differences between PI7 and earlier versions is the inclusion of a Today plugin. I had finally given up on this feature ever coming, and in its absence I’ve been using the superb Spb Software House Diary which integrates beautifully with PI7. But in order to give it a fair shake, I was willing to uninstall (or at least uncheck) Diary’s Today plugin in favor of the official PI version.

But hrm! This long list with its endless scroll bar is not what I want to see on my Today screen. In all fairness, the PI7 Reference Manual (p5) comes right out and says that "for a more full featured today plugin [they] suggest looking at SPB Diary or SBSH Pocket Breeze." There are a few options available to tweak the Today plugin, for instance you can set it not to show tasks; to show starting/due today/tomorrow tasks; or in progress tasks. It can be set to show either Today’s or Today’s and Tomorrow’s appointments. Choosing the "starting/due today/tomorrow" option might be great for a light Tasks user, but there is a problem: instead of displaying them a straight line, the tasks indent. I have almost 100 tasks on my PDA at any given time, so my list ends up being completely unreadable from the Today screen because it looks like this…

The good news is that tapping an appointment or task will directly open the item in Pocket Informant, or clicking the PI icon in the views upper left side will open PI in the last opened view. Opening PI7 from the Today screen plugin renders a blank page that says "No Items to Display." Notice the colored PI ball in the upper right of the toolbar? This is the equivalent of the hourglass or spinning timer Windows Mobile users have come to loathe; it will pass to the right as the page loads…

…disappearing behind the right arrow multiple times (in this case three)…

…and then the view will finally appear. This time it took 15 seconds to see the Agenda, which has alas been my favorite view; it’s also the view I prefer on the regular Windows Mobile 5 or 6 Calendar. Speaking of WM6, its Agenda view also includes an appointment bar which has a flashy scrolling feature I have come to enjoy.

You’ll notice that at the bottom of the screen, there are various tabs above the soft buttons. According to the PI Reference Guide, "Pocket Informant uses a tabbed interface, with each component (or View) on a separate tab shown along the bottom of the screen, above the toolbar." The five main components of Pocket Informant are Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and Search with Journal.

It took 16 seconds for PI7 to load from the time I tapped its icon in Programs. In contrast, the regular WM5 Calendar program takes three seconds to load from its Today screen plugin, and it takes two seconds to load from its icon in Programs. I almost feel like I am caught in a time warp. What was my major complaint against PI2? How slow it was, right? Well, once again I am complaining, and you should realize that it is taking this long to open views on a device with a 624MHz processor!

I find it frustrating to wait for Pocket Informant’s Calendar to load when I am standing at a counter trying to enter an appointment. My PDA is supposed to be my personal digital assistant - immediately ready to accept the information I need to enter. It is a sad day when I am tempted to just go ahead and accept a doctor’s appointment card because it is taking too long to enter the new appointment in my PDA, yet that has been the case several times.

According to the PI7 Reference Guide, "Calendar has 5 sub-views; Agenda View, Day View, Week View, Month View and the new Timeline View. Each sub-view shares the same data and filters, but differs on what dates to display and other interface settings."

This is the Day view…

This is the Week view; remember that additional icon sets can be purchased if the basic set included with PI aren’t enough for you.

This is the Month view, which basically shows timelines to give you an idea of how empty or full a day might be. 

There are several ways that a future or past date can be chosen: tapping on the month, day/date or year in the top title bar will pull up a drop down menu with corresponding choices. The current day can always be reached by tapping the square with the arrow on it, located on the far upper left. 

The next tab is Notes, which as the Reference Guide states:

The Notes View is a single view that displays Outlook Notes in any folder within My Documents in main memory, storage cards, or Flash ROM storage, including PhatWare’s © PhatNotes™ and PhatPad™ notes and WAV sound files. Outlook Notes are shown in a hierarchical format depicting their location in the file system and PhatNotes™ show up in a tree of their respective databases. This wide choice of note types allows Pocket Informant™ to truly be the one and only place to use Notes. Pocket Informant™ further improves upon Outlook Notes by offering the ability to categorize the note and to set an alarm on the note to display at a future time.

There’s no denying it, PI7 rules when it comes to added Notes functionality.

Here is one of my busiest PIM screens, whether in Pocket Informant or Pocket Office…the Task view. According to the PI7 Reference Guide:

The Task View is one of the most powerful views within Pocket Informant™. You can use the powerful filters to manage tasks that number well into the thousands by showing only the ones that you need to see immediately. Using the Grouping, Sorting, Filtering, Category Filtering, and Priority capability together with Custom Views will increase your productivity greatly. The amount of power you wield from using these tools depends on some forethought about organization and usage patterns. We recommend that you manage your tasks within Pocket Informant™ even when at your desk to increase your proficiency with this tool.

I usually keep mine filtered by category, which is also how I like to keep them filtered on my Today screen with Spb Diary. I tend to try to keep things as simple as possible with my Tasks, but there are so many choices available for personalizing this tool that it can be a bit mind-boggling. Let’s just say that the pages concerning the Task feature are 45 through 52 of the Reference Guide; everything you ever wanted to know about sorting and filtering tasks is covered there.

Loading Contacts takes 10 seconds from the time the PI icon is tapped in Programs to when it finally opens; once again, I think that is too darn long! A single tap to open a contact takes 5 additional seconds. In comparison, opening the WM Contact program takes one second, and opening a contact takes less than half of a second. However, the tradeoff is that by using PI’s Contacts program, you get quite a few new display possibilities.

According to the Reference Guide:

By default, the Contacts View displays a list of the contacts in your Windows Mobile™ database sorted by the default File As order. Pocket Informant™ supports displaying the contacts in several orders, such as by
• First Name/Last Name
• Last Name/First Name
• File As
• Picture List (which displays the assigned picture of each contact, in addition to the other contact details)
• Call Log
• Recent
• By Company
• By Department
• By City
• By State
• By Country
• By Category

Only you can decide if the additional wait is worth the added functions, or if you need more instantaneous access to your Contacts.

Tapping on an individual contact pulls up a screen which shows their contact information with selectable buttons for calling, emailing or texting, as well as a Call Log.

There is no doubt in my mind that installing Pocket Informant to your PDA will give that PDA a whole new spectrum of functions that were previously impossible. But the question is: at what cost? Pocket Informant has nearly tripled in size since 2002, and it is once again much slower than I find acceptable. While it’s true that it can do all sorts of things that the built in WM5 or WM6 PIMs can’t, many of these added features are not things that I want or personally need. And as I mentioned before, it’s not as if I have started using my PDA any less. If anything I have even more Contacts and Tasks to deal with these days than ever before.

I already talked about how slowly Pocket Informant runs on my Advantage, now here’s the next issue: With only PI7 running, my Advantage shows 58.74MB of free program memory from a possible 111.08MB; with PI7 closed, there is 61.87 available. This sounds like no big deal, but the Advantage is one of the few PDAs I own with that much available program memory. In contrast, with no programs running at all, my HTC Mogul shows 14.26MB free of a possible 47.46MB. I haven’t even been tempted to load PI on the Mogul, because I have scraped the bottom of its memory barrel while running multiple programs at once.

The thing to consider here is that just as Pocket Informant has continued to evolve, Windows Mobile PIMs have done the same. Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Tasks have all received tweaks and improvements over the years, and in some cases I feel that they may have erased the need for anyone but the most hard-core PIM users to upgrade. In fact, I suspect that many of those hard-core users might be satisfied with the recent updates included in Windows Mobile 6. I feel like the improvements offered in Pocket Informant are certainly nice enough, but in the end there are almost too many features, and they don’t add to a positive user experience. It takes too long for the program to open, it once again takes too long for new entries to refresh, and the program is a memory hog. It pains me to say it, but I think I liked the version that came installed on my HP iPAQ 4700 the best. That was a lean, mean, fighting Pocket Informant that offered improved features for all of the included PIMs without serious lag or memory crunch.

The good news here is that Alex Kac has always been a man who listened to his customers - both current and potential. While I have no doubt that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people using PI7 that are completely happy with it, I think there are also hundreds, if not thousands who have downloaded the program’s free trial and felt intimidated by all of its menus and options, put off by its size, or disappointed by how slowly it loads. My hope is that Alex will consider offering a "lite" Pocket Informant version, one that improves upon the all the basic Pocket Outlook PIMs, but that addresses the speed and memory issues I’ve experienced.

Pocket Informant 7 is available directly from Web IS, as well as from other resellers.
MSRP: $34.95, currently on sale at Web IS for $24.95, additional icon sets can be purchased for $8 - $10.
What I like: Completely customizable; oodles of features; can be as complicated or as simple as the user needs it to be
What Needs Improvement: Takes an unacceptable amount of time for the Calendar to open; program is a memory hog; it’s so big and there are so many options now that reading the manual is no longer just a good idea - it is almost necessary.

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