Pocket Informant Review (version 8.5)

For many of the Pocket PC users, the feature they most frequently use is the Personal Information Management (PIM). But the Pocket Outlook has many unsolved issues. That’s where the third-party applications like Pocket Informant come really handy.

INSTALLATION AND REGISTRATION

Pocket Informant, like any other application can be installed on to the device through Activesync, or you can directly download the cab file to your device. It takes up around 4 MB of storage memory.

When you install the application, you get a warning stating that if Pocket Informant is stored in the storage card, it may hamper the performance of the application. When you install it to your storage card, the application becomes really sloggy. So it is recommended that the application is installed in the main memory.

NEW ENTRIES

Creating a new appointment, task or journal is pretty simple. From the agenda view, tap on ‘menu’ and tap on ‘new’.  You get the option to select which new entry you wish to create.

I chose journal.

Journal is any special event that you may need to remember, but it is not a task or an appointment. It’s something like Mr.X needs to give you something on a particular day or time. This cannot be categorized under task or appointment. So, journal was created for this purpose. You can also link a journal to any task, appointment or a contact.

Back to creating a new entry. When you tap on any item, say journal, you are presented with a blank form. In this form, you can fill in the subject, company, type, etc. You can also select a parent for the journal if you want, which can be a task, appointment or a contact.

An interesting feature is the way you enter the time. Select the time field and  then you are presented with a screen in which you can enter the hour and followed by minute entry.

USAGE

The first screen of Pocket informant looks like this:

This screen presents you with the various views. Lets see every view and go through it in detail.

AGENDA

In agenda mode, all your appointments, tasks and journals are displayed in the order of their occurrence. But you can modify the settings to change the items you want should appear in the agenda mode. This helps you to keep a track of all your tasks and appointments from a single screen.

CALENDAR

In Pocket Informant 8, you can view the calendar in 3 modes :

1. DAY

The day mode displays the events of the current day. You can customize it in your own way to decide the items you want to be displayed. The timeline at the top displays the time of the day being displayed. In the timeline, red means some conflict. At the bottom of the screen is the tasks. Also, the day mode can be displayed in half hour as well as one hour durations.

2. WEEK

By default, the week mode displays the current week. The top half screen is reserved for the first day of the week. The rest half is divided into 6 blocks, one block for the rest of the six days of the week. By default, it displays only the appointments, but you can modify the settings to include the tasks and journals as well, the way I have done in the above screenshot.

3. MONTH

This mode displays the current month. The current day is highlighted in yellow. Holidays are in green and rest of the days are in gray. The days with appointments have a time line next to them showing the appointment with a blue or red bar on the timeline (blue represents busy and red represents some conflict). The days with scheduled task(s) have a number next to them showing the number of tasks for the day. Tap on any day to view the events for the day. This is how it is displayed :

The timeline in the screenshot above shows how your time for that particular day is allocated.

NOTES

Notes are organized into folders. Just tap on any folder to open it, or tap on any notes to view its contents as in the screenshot below.

Pocket Informant integrates with even PhatNotes and PhatPad to look for all your notes.

TASKS

This mode displays your due tasks for the next one month. To the left of every task is a date that shows the date on which it is due. Tasks with a flag to the left represent the tasks that are due on the current day. There is a check box to the extreme left of every task. Just tap on the box to mark the task as completed. Just tap on any task to view its details.

One feature of the tasks which I found worth discussing here is the option to create regenerating tasks. These are the tasks which you need to perform again and again after an interval of a few days. These tasks have an arrow next to them at the extreme right and a number displaying the number of days after which they recur.

Another feature of the task mode which I found really exciting is the easy filter option. As you can see in the screenshot below, you can filter the tasks on the basis of their dates of occurrence, master, projects, tasks in progress, completed, overdue, etc.

Daily tasks are the tasks with a firm deadline.

Master tasks are the ones for which you do not have a exact date on which you need to complete it.

Project tasks are a group of task which are related to each other in some or the other manner. Other filters are self-explanatory in my opinion.

CONTACTS

The contacts mode displays all your contacts. There is a strip of letters to the extreme right which lets you to select the letters of which you want the contacts to be displayed. You can enable or display the strip using the small icon next to the search bar.

Just tap on the contact whose details you want to view and here it is.

Once you have opened the contact, from the menus, you can create appointment, meeting or task with that particular person.

You can also choose to filter the contacts on the basis of the categories. Or you can also display them on the basis on the pictures, firstlast name, by company, department, city state or country.

You can choose to view the contact you most recently viewed. Or you can also view the recent call log.

You can activate the ‘abc bar’ from the toolbar that displays a bar on the top that lets you display contacts with the letters of your choice. Another option that serves the same purpose is the ’12-key search’.

12-key search

SEARCH

This is one of my favorite features of Pocket Informant. All you need to do is, just type in the name of any of your tasks, appointments or journals and tap on the green icon next to it and bang comes a list of events related to it.

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are five icons below the search bar, representing appointments, tasks, contacts, notes, and journals. Tap on these icons to combine the databases you want to be searched or select them all to search all.

SOMETHING SPECIAL

TOUCH-MODE

As in most of the applications today, Pocket Informant also comes with a ‘touch-mode’. I found this mode to be pretty useful, specially in case of contacts. Here’s a screensot, showing contacts in Pocket Informant in touch mode. It also has the bar containing the alphabets.

TODAY-PLUGIN

Pocket Informant has a simple yet useful today plugin that displays all your critical information on your today screen itself.

CONCLUSION

Pocket Informant is a very useful application to help the users organize themselves. It is a PIM software that lets you create and manage your tasks, appointments, etc. on the touch of a button. And this is one of the very few softwares that have been around for so many years and yet is so successful and loved by everyone who uses it. Let me put it this way, IT IS THE ULTIMATE PIM application for mobile devices.

PROS AND CONS

PROS

  • A simple yet very useful today plugin.
  • Attractive and easy to understand interface.
  • Highly customizable.
  • Every minute detail of tasks and appointments is taken care of.
  • Facility to link various tasks, appointments, contacts and appointments with each other.
  • Great support

CONS

  • Cannot be stored on storage card.

Pocket Informant is available for the Windows Mobile, iPhone and Blackberry

It costs $29.95 16.95 for limited period of time. So, hurry!

WebIS Pocket Informant Homepage