With all the browser choices, games, and launchers available for our devices it can be easy to forget about where it all started: the Personal Information Manager. You know, using your device to keep track of appointments, tasks, and contacts that would otherwise be rubbed or washed away if you were to write them on your hand.

Windows Mobile has never made me all that happy in this department. The default contacts view is alright, but I really wish I had more customization choices in the calendar and task portions. I like seeing all my appointments in lists, and I like filtering my tasks so that I don’t get overwhelmed by all 900 of them at once.

Agendus 2.1 from Iambic promises to improve upon the default pocket outlook experience, offering a wealth of views and features so that you can tailor the program to your day and your style. I’ve been checking the program out for the last month, so hit the jump and let’s have a full look at it!

Installation

You have to submit your email to their site before they send you the link to their download page. I installed Agendus to my storage card via .cab file and had no problems operating the program with this installation.

After installing you have to put in a key (which you receive via e-mail) to activate your two-week demo of Agendus, otherwise the program will lock up in under a day. Over the course of your trial period Iambic also sends you sets of tutorial e-mails, showing you features you may not have realized you were there. This is an interesting and helpful approach to helping new users out, and I think it is one people will appreciate. One thing I didn’t like so much was being reminded daily that I was using a trial, but this is (unfortunately) a commonplace practice and isn’t something I’m picking on Iambic for. 

The program seems to take up around 3.5 MB of storage space and 2 MB of RAM when active, which is around average for a PIM program in my experience.

Standard vs Professional

There are two editions of Agendus, Standard and Professional. All features in the Standard version are included in the Professional, and the Professional features a set of online features and expanded modes of certain views. A full comparison chart of features can be found here, but suffice it to say that the Professional and Standard version share most of the same features and that this review can stand for both in most cases. Thankfully, both features include the ability to have Agendus become the default PIM.

Views

With that said, the heart of any PIM software is the ability to manage and filter your information according to your needs. Agendus has six views to help you get through each day in one piece:

1. Today View
2. Day View
3. Week View
4. Month View
5. Contacts View
6. Tasks View

You change views via the stylus or the d-pad, and you can relocate the tabs to the top or bottom of the screen (the latter is the default). Note that there’s also an extra messaging shortcut within the program (shown as an envelope in the above screenshot), but all it does is launch outlook messaging and so does not qualify as a ‘view’ mode. I’m actually unsure as to why this button was included.

Speaking of the tabs bar — one feature I’d really enjoy in a future version would be the ability to hide tabs I don’t use. The Today View has options to hide certain aspects that you don’t like (Stocks, for example) and the program seems to be all about giving the user as many views as possible to fit almost anyone’s needs. So it makes sense that I should be given the choice to hide functions that I rarely use, such as the day, week, and contact views.

Today View ("Calendar" button on tabs view)

Agendus has a unique take (or at least the first I’ve seen in a WM PIM) on the today view. Not only does it show the upcoming week’s appointments and tasks, but also things like calls and recent messages. I was quite confused by the latter two features until I read the manual. I thought the calls and recent messages were for recent calls and e-mails, but it turns out they’re for scheduled calls and recent SMS. In Agendus you can put scheduled calls into your schedule, as opposed to just making appointments named "Call Andrew". Call me old fashioned (and I’m too young to be old fashioned), but I’m fine with just one basic appointment type . The option of having more is always appreciated though, and I’m sure corporate power users will make good use of this feature.

The "Today" view is also host to a set of online-related features which are only available in the Professional edition: stocks, quote of the day, this day in history, and weather. The options menu allows you to take out aspects of the today view that you don’t use or need, so I removed calls, messaging, and stocks after the first few days.

Tapping on an appointment in this or any of the calendar views will bring you to the appointment edit dialog, which is completely different than the one in pocket outlook (although you do have the choice to use pocket outlook’s dialogs if you like them better — more on this later).

Not Your Finger’s PIM

Speaking of the default PIM, Agendus is decidedly a stylus and d-pad based with its small tabs and tiny calendar views — much like the default pocket outlook. You can do most everything once you whip out your stylus, but the d-pad takes a little bit longer.

Unlike one of the other big 3rd party player in the field, Pocket Informant, there is only one way to switch tabs: click on the d-pad until you get there. This is easy enough in Week or Month list modes, where a quick tap of left or right on the d-pad will highlight the tabs at the bottom. On the other hand, when you’re in the middle of a view like month standard it can become more of a chore to quickly switch tabs because the left and right keys get remapped to horizontal selection on the calendars. This means you just have to repeatedly click on the d-pad until you’re finally selecting a tab icon. While there is no easy cure for this using only the d-pad, I’d really like to be able to assign a softkey for switching tabs in the future.

Day View ("1" button on tabs menu)

This is split up into two modes:

There’s block mode (like pocket outlook’s day view), which I’ve never quite gotten used to. But this is purely a matter of taste. I’m just never busy enough to warrant seeing all the free slots in my day. I just need to see where I’m actually busy and doing something

Then comes split mode (shows tasks and appointments separately), which I prefer just because it allows me to see some of my active tasks.

One extra thing I’d like to mention in day view is that the weather forecast icon also shows beside the day title if you have downloaded it (Professional edition only). This little detail goes a way towards making this an all-in-one daily driver solution, although it could be even better if it showed the current temperature.

Week View ("7" on tabs menu)

This view is split up into three sections (note: it also supports the weather icons):

List mode allows you to see everything (tasks and appointments) in a nice, scrollable list. It’s a dynamic view that lets you see the week ahead of you, instead of just seeing a week from Sunday to Saturday.

Block view is very similar to the week view in pocket outlook: you see blocks of time for each day of the week and tapping on an appointment will make a preview window pop up so you know which appointments are which.

Last, but not least, we have the 7-Day Grid mode. And although this view is very efficient in terms of seeing which days are clear, I find the display is just far too crowded for me to see anything on my QVGA screen. All I can see are the times of the appointments and nothing much else. There is no preview upon tapping on an appointment like the "block view" mode, and a tap takes you to the edit dialog instead. I would definitely like the option to see a preview of the appointment in later updates.

Month View ("31" button on tabs menu)

This has the largest number of modes by far and goes above and beyond what is offered by pocket outlook.

The first mode is just a standard month view. Tapping on a day will take you to the day view.

Expanded mode is one of my two favourite views in the month view tab. Not only do you get a general overview of the month, but you are also presented with a wedged in summary of each day’s appointments and tasks. I think this mode does a good job of presenting a lot of information without making everything look too crowded or overwhelming — which is exactly what your PIM should help you do.

Clocks is another interesting take on a PIM view. The clocks show (in shaded dark blue areas) which areas of the day are taken up. The left-most clock is for AM and the right-most clock is for PM. This view could easily become a favourite of users, since it allows you to quickly check which parts of the day are free without actually changing views. If your clocks on a certain day are all blue, then you’re probably in for a bumpy ride!

Icons mode shows each day’s event with a corresponding icon (which can be changed via the Icon Editor in the main menu). Two birthdays on a day shows two birthday cakes, three tasks show up as three calendars, and so on. Although I do see the merit in seeing how busy each day is, I’m not sure how practical it is to have these tallies in their own dedicated view. When I want to see a month view it’s mainly to see which days are busy, or where I can quickly schedule a dinner or movie with a friend. Seeing how many tasks, birthdays, and appointments are on a particular day doesn’t tell me much about how free I’ll be in the evening — and I could easily glean this information off of any of the other month views.

The fifth mode available in month is the list view, which is exactly like the Week View’s list view. One thing I discovered while writing this review is that the lists in week and month view are actually a lot more flexible than I thought. You can actually tap the "Choose Date" button near the top of the screen to specify how large an area you’d like to cover in the list. So instead of limiting yourself to seeing everything from January to February, how about seeing everything from January to December? This would probably take a while to render in the program, but it just shows the list mode’s power and customizability.

Quarter Standard is the sixth mode in Month View. It shows the next three months as well as a preview of the selected day. Days with events on them are identifiable via a small blue tick beside the date of the day.  January 1, for example, has a blue tick beside it, whereas January 22 on my calendar clearly has none. I find this indicator system a little difficult to see on my QVGA screen. Some other method could be better (perhaps different colours for dates with events?).

For the most part, Agendus does a good job of making information immediately accessible in one area, but the preview box in the lower right corner just cuts too much off for it to be genuinely useful.  In the end, although the idea of a date picker with an immediate preview very useful, it’s the next mode that really gets the job done right for me.

The seventh mode in Month View is Quarter Expanded, and it’s everything Quarter Standard should be by default. You have just two months that take up the top half of the screen, and the bottom half is devoted to the selected day’s preview. This way you have enough space to actually read what events are happening on the day (as opposed to the screenshot above, where you can really only see the time of an appointment). The only scrollbar you have to deal with is a vertical one, and if you really are that busy, there’s no getting around that. But at least there’s no horizontal bar to deal with.

Contacts View

This view is relatively straight-forward compared to the others offered by Agendus.

You have Standard mode, where each contact takes up just one line and the first e-mail address or phone number will show up beside the name. Business contacts show up in pink highlight, while the rest are listed in white. The main problem I had with this standard mode is that long names or e-mail addresses can end up bleeding into contact names, and vice versa. I realize there is only so much space on the screen, but even when you highlight a contact using the d-pad you still can’t see a name in its entirety — it’s always jammed onto one line.

Tapping on a person or company name will open the contact up in Agendus. To access the other e-mail addresses or numbers not shown on-screen all you need to do is tap-and-hold with the stylus to get a quick pop-up menu. This way, you can quickly fire off an email or SMS without leaving Agendus.

Contacts Expanded allows you to see the various e-mail addresses and phone numbers for each contact in list form. I thought that this mode was more useful than Standard, but would still like more of a hybrid between the two. Perhaps a third mode could be added where each contact is one line at first, but then expands upon a tap or a double tap.

One issue that keeps me from really utilizing this contact list as my daily driver is how sensitive it is to stylus taps. I don’t appreciate how one tap on any portion of a phone number will initiate a dialling dialog, especially if what I wanted to tap on was the contact’s name or the scrollbar beside it. This might work better for other users, but I just found that it got in my way.

Neither mode of the contact view supports pictures in the lists, but this isn’t a big issue for me as I found these pictures often slowed scrolling down on my device.

The aspect that Agendus does make much more convenient is contact creation and editing. The different areas of contact details are divided into tabs that can be accessed via the stylus or the softkey menu.

Tasks View

The last of the Agendus views, and certainly one of the most useful. There’s only one mode on task view, but the filters drop-down lists up top make it a versatile one (although that’s misleading — all views in Agendus have quick access to filters up top). Tapping on the checkbox on the left side will complete the task (but it still doesn’t make all the work go away — the technology’s just not there yet).

Tapping on a task takes you straight into the editing dialog (and like the appointment dialog, you do have the choice of using pocket outlook’s editor instead).

Search Mode

Got an appointment, task, or contact you need to find quickly? Just tap the search button (magnifying glass in the tabs section) and start typing away! The search is fast and efficient. Simple enough!

Overall Impressions

Alright, now that I’ve covered the general features of Agendus, let’s talk about how this program handles in practice. First off, it’s definitely a good looking program. Most everything in the interface has been skinned, including the scrollbars (a good thing!). The only portion of the program that doesn’t quite keep up with the visual style is the tabs section. Whereas all the other drop-down menus and icons are surrounded by boxes with gradients and shadows, the tabs are left on a blank, white background. A quick coat of paint on the tab icons and bar could really help spruce up the general visuals of the program. It’s more fun when everything is matching and glossy .

Some Trouble with big 3rd party SIPs

This complaint doesn’t fit in any one section, since it affects you any time you try to use Agendus’ new task or appointment dialog. One thing that could use an immediate is the strange inability to use any 3rd party SIPs that are bigger than the default keyboard. Here’s the appointment dialog with the SIP down.

The problem here lies with the fact that only the text input area is scrollable, and not the whole window (unlike the default pocket outlook appointment dialog)

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Now take a look at how little space we’re left with in Agendus when we use a relatively small SIP like Tengo.

This means that big SIPs like PocketCM Keyboard or TouchPal end up blocking the entire writing area off and you end up having to write blindly, as you can’t even see what you’re typing anymore. The interface also doesn’t redraw properly.

One quick way around this problem is to select "use default pocket outlook dialog" in the options menu, but I think it’s a fair expectation to have the Agendus dialogs to support 3rd party SIPs as well as pocket outlook does.

Conclusion

My month with Agendus 2.1 has been an interesting one. It does have some very unique and useful views, but eventually I found its interface a little too roundabout for my liking. Although tabs can be switched via the stylus, I like managing my device without ever having to take the stylus out, and the hardware button support doesn’t quite allow me to do this.

The program is certainly a lot friendlier to new users in terms of its immediate usability and its options than say, Pocket Informant. The e-mails that Iambic sends you during your trial are definitely helpful, and the options menu doesn’t overwhelms a user who wants to configure things a bit (although I’d like a few more options!). So if you’ve become frustrated with the limited capabilities of Pocket Outlook and are looking for another PIM solution that will integrate with your system, then think about giving Agendus 2.1 a try.

Product Name: Agendus 2.1

Developer: Iambic

Price: $24.99 Professional, $19.99 Standard

Availability: Agendus, Softonic,

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