With regards to software, I am very fickle. Today is AO, but nothing is to say I wouldn’t go back to using PI if met my needs sometime in the future.

To clarify a few of your points:

1) I never upgraded my 4700 to WM5, so I never experienced slower speeds on that device. Perhaps because PI was loaded in the ROM, it also responded more quickly.

2) I always load programs above an arbitrary size (>150KB) to a memory card. PI7 was no exception, and I suspect that this is the root cause of why my times were slower. While it’s true that many of the newer devices have adequate program storage to put it in main memory, old habits die hard - I will always load a program onto the card (or in the case of the Advantage, on it’s internal 8GB hard drive) to conserve space.

I suspect that most Pocket PC users have been conditioned to do the same, which means that it is very important for larger programs to either be optimised to run directly from a card, or it needs to be said up front that the program should run from main memory - perhaps by having the installer warn that if users put the program on a memory card, then it will take a performance hit.

I can’t argue coding because I am not a coder. All I can do is write about my personal experience and my observations while using PI7. At the end of the day, people should download the trial and see whether it serves their needs or not.

Take care,
Judie

Second - I want to thank you for doing at least 1 thing that Microsoft hasn’t done in all these years and that’s make the Calendar a pleasure to look at. PI Calendar is definitely a must have for me, not because it does anything above and beyond the original software, but because I like the look and feel. Too many times that is overlooked!

I took this info from the PI3 files I have on our archive site so they are completely valid.

But binary size has very little to do with memory. Memory usage wise, PI uses the same as it always has due to very heavy optimizations. On a VGA device its going to use about an extra 400-900k of RAM simply because of the bitmaps of a VGA screen require that.

I know because #1 we used to get complaints about that in 2002 and our info for mem usage on Handango hasn’t changed since I setup that account in 2001.

1) You mention that automatic custom views and categories is too organized and that WM6 already supports filtering. The problem is that this is not a new filtering option. WM2000 through Wm6 and PI 2 through PI 2007 support filtering. What is new here is that its AUTOMATIC. You set a time period for certain filters or custom views to appear and they filter automatically. No version does of WM does this. The idea here is simply to simplify your life so that if you have specific filtering needs at different times in the day you can make things automatic.

2) You mention that WM5/6 already do Contact Searches. Yes, they do. The difference is that PI does a better job. A lot of things that we mention that WM5/6 already have are because PI does them better.

3) Multiple Alarms - 3 options: Travel appts made and managed automatically for you, a notification only alarm, or an appt alarm - as many as you want per appt.

4) 5 PowerFul views. You write: “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.” But the truth is - those views are horrible. They are barely usable. We are working on new advertising that specifically shows the major differences. Its like DOS and Vista different.

5) Groupings and Filtering are *very* different. You simply cannot compare the two.

6) Category Filtering. Compare the built in filtering to PI’s. They simply don’t compare. First, the built in apps are hard to use for filtering. No buts about it. Their UI is horrible. PI’s is far easier AND provides many more features for filtering.

7) Rich Text. Yes you *CAN* enter rich text notes directly on your PDA. Pocket Informant has allowed that for years and still does! Bold, italics, bullets, justifications, fonts.
Tasks indent on Today plugin. This is a bug we fixed in an FTF available on our WebSite forums. Embarrasing….

9) Speed

a) Calendar: 15 seconds is way too long. I’m not 100% sure why it took so long, but it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds unless you have PI installed on a storage card or you have a *lot* of recurring appts with notes.
b) Contacts. Same here. Even with 5000 contacts I’ve tested it takes no longer than about 8 seconds to load. I would love to get more info from you on this.
c) Contacts display. The time you see here is actually due to PI initializing context menu plugins on the device. These are done through a WM API that is very slow, but the good news is we’re working on a way to make that much faster.

10) None of the extra features of PI cause any slowdown. Also as far as PI tripling in size - that’s false. Most of the “tripling” is simply extra resources such as the extra icons, bitmaps for VGA (the VGA resources are 2x larger than the QVGA ones and have to have both images for classic toolbars and soft keys). But the PI binary itself is only about 25% larger in 5 years.

I do wonder why things are taking so longer on your device, though. On my 8525 (a QVGA device), I can load my entire calendar from start to finish in about 5 seconds, contacts in 2 seconds. And that’s what *most* people we know see. The calendar code in PI 2007 is nearly IDENTICAL to the calendar code that existed on your 4700 (if you had the WM5 version). However WM5/6 database access is dramatically slower than WM2003 so if you are comparing between WM2003 4700 and WM6 - then that may be the problem. PI Contacts is as optimized as possible for WM5. It simply cannot get any faster. Wm6 Contacts can be faster because it can use the database sorts. We can’t because #1 the database sorts are wrong for localization (i.e. it sorts non-English characters incorrectly) and #2 those sorts are useless unless we only show things in ABC FileAs order.

11) Memory. The memory difference you see is 3.13MB. 1.5MB of that is binary. The rest is program data that we cache. This is very small. Pocket IE by itself grows to 10MB of memory usage in 15-20 minutes. Messaging uses up 2-5MB within a few minutes. PI sits at a very constant 3-4MB of use.

12) Looking at WM2003-Wm6, what do I really see as updates? Not much. And since the views for Tasks and Calendar (with the exception of the nice WM6 Calendar time bar) are pretty horrid, I’d really like to know how you can say things have improved? They hardly have!

13) The version of PI - PI 2007 uses LESS memory than the version on the 4700. Its more optimized and faster even. We profiled it, its technically true. I have to technically disgree with you that PI is a memory hog and all that. Honestly, it sounds more like some sort of issue with the install on the device or something else that we need to look at. Every version of PI I work on I spend weeks optimizing even more things. I don’t want to sound harsh, but anyone who thinks the extra features in PI slow things down simply doesn’t understand applications. Most of the extra features sit in areas of code that don’t get called until called upon. They have nothing to do with speed, bloat, or anything at all. PI uses no more memory or more CPU than before with those features in there.

Let me put it another way - I could remove every feature you mentioned that you don’t use above and you would see ZERO performance improvement or memory improvement. Pocket Informant is written in a way that if you don’t use a feature, it uses 0% extra RAM or CPU. This is true for even the binary code itself because for every extra code we add, I work hard at optimizing our existing code to cut fat away. In most cases we remove 100k of code and add 100k of code equaling about the same amount of code. The only place where things have grown 2-3x in the last 5 years has been the resources - bitmaps, strings, dialogs, menubars, icons - by necessity of all the new platforms.

I will also add that we are working on PI8 now. The big thing with PI8 is to make the UI and features more scalable. For example we have a mode I call internally the “Pocket Outlook” mode which hides all the major features of PI to make it simpler and less intimidating. Then a user can start peeling away like an onion to reveal new features.

I had not paid much attention to the load times, but I will now. And I will admit that those numbers are somewhat troubling.

Also, in the latest version, when I soft reset my device, PI loads automatically which is somewhat annoying.

PI was absolutely an essential program, however, with many recent improvements to the native WinMo applications, one has to wonder whether there is really a need for a 3rd party PIM anymore.

What do you all think?

Doug