Doug

PI 8 seems to be caught in mid-evolution, kinda like a fish with feet. I bet that the next major update will have everything finger-friendly, but right now I can’t find a compelling reason to upgrade. I’ve already clocked my hours with the byzantine options menu in PI 2007, and I’m one of the few people still rocking an Axim so I don’t need the improved phone features (although click to email would be nice).

@Stefan, I’m not sure what you mean by corresponding entries in the list above it. I like being able to enter text details for an appointment, like an RSVP number that doesn’t deserve to be a contact or which chapters to read before a lecture, and I don’t see a way to do that other than through the little buttons at the bottom.

@Judie, I’ve never had a problem entering or viewing data with PI, although I’ve given the more sophisticated categorization options a deliberately wide berth. What else do you think is complicated and overwhelming?

I think the problem with the storage cards is really a hit or miss kind of thing. Some people have problems and some don’t. If you read Judie’s PI2007 review, she had terrible problems with it. So, I do think WebIS did the right thing recommending that you only load it in the main memory.

As for the settings. I’ll be honest here. I found them to be terribly confusing and overwhelming in PI2007. In PI8, they are much less so. Still, there are a lot of settings and not all of them are where I would intuitively look for them. But I do think that as cumbersome as these settings are, they have been considerably improved from previous versions. That being said, they they are still not always very intuitive.

Doug

Of course – as a man – I almost never read the instructions. And, even though I did print and bind those for PI8, your review gave some great insight into how PI 8 can do more for me.

There are some frustrations, however for this user of PI 7. It blows my mind that some settings have been moved to different menus. As everyone mentions, the level of customization available in PI is daunting. There are sooo many ways to look at things. PI 8 has had a steeper learning curve than I might have expected as a PI 7 user because of changes to the placement of several options. But your review helped quite a bit and the newest release has fixed some issues.

Incidentally, I have installed PI on my card and never had an issue, but I am going to reinstall it into the memory to see if it speeds up enough to overcome my long fomented issues about taking up built-in memory.

@SPM, Are you talking about my comments with respect to creating a new entry? My point there was primarily that these buttons felt like a throwback to previous versions. If they were going to be included, they should have been made easier to access without a stylus.

As for the images, I intentionally made them as big as possible in the review for that reason.

Doug

Just take this image:
http://justanothermobilemonday.com/Wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/pc-capture49.jpg

and this one:
http://spmwinkel.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/jan142008.png

Right-click them, and copy them. Then paste them in the same window in Paint and cover one image with the other. For me, my image is larger and better readable than the image from the review.
Or maybe it’s just my laptop’s screen resolution (or my tires eyes) that make it harder for me to read the screenshots in the review.

I’m not sure what you meant about the 100% size pics. Aren’t these 100%? I put my TyTN to my monitor and they match up exactly.

A comment on entering new data – you say that the tabs at the bottom are very hard to pick without a stylus – that’s why they also have corresponding entries in the list above it! On your screenshot you’ll see that the bottom two visible fields both match with one of the tabs, so you can simply edit your attendees by tapping/D-Pad selecting it in the scrollable list.

As for Touch mode, it doesn’t support tap-and-hold. This might very well be part of the idea of Touch Mode, but for me tap-and-hold functionality is too important, so I can’t sacrifice that.

One more thing – I like pictures in a review better if I can see them 100% after clicking. Smaller previews inside a review are fine but seeing the full version after clicking them would be quite nice.

That is to say, I’ve always found PI and plugins like SPB Diary and Pocketbreeze to be mutually exclusive. They both take care of the same things, but the plugins just use poutlook dialogues for their appt/task creation. But then again, I see all of this as a super RAM hungry user, since I use the device as my mp3 player as well, so the extra plugins just mean less memory for music.

I completely agree with the sentiments on touch scroll mode, the contacts bar being too darn small for my fingers, and the lag when scrolling to a particular letter in contacts.

Despite all this, a definite raised glass in the direction of Alex Kac and WebIS for another good release!