Some of you may not realize this, but there is a new writer over at Just Another Mobile Monday. For the first time, JAMM has hired a female writer. And not just any woman, but one you all should be familiar with, Gear Diary’s own Judie Lipsett Hughes. For her first JAMM review, Judie took a look at the latest iteration of WebIS Pocket Informant. Take a look, but be kind. Remember, she is kind of the “newbie” over there.

In her review, Judie, who has been a Pocket Informant user almost since its inception, looks at the new features in this version, as well as the returning favorites. In addition to giving her (sometimes blunt) views of the features included in this version; Judie also looks at what is new in Windows Mobile 6, and whether Pocket Informant is well on its way to becoming obsolete as Windows Mobile becomes a more complete system. So, do you need Pocket Informant to compliment the native features in the Windows Mobile Operating System? With Windows Mobile 2003SE, the answer was clearly yes. Under Windows Mobile 5, it was probably, but it depends. Now, Windows Mobile 6 is here, and you will have to read Judie’s review to find out whether Pocket Informant remains an essential application on your device, or whether it is destined for the tar pits of obsolete third party applications.

Check out Judie’s full review, here.

12 Original Responses to “Just Another Mobile Monday Reviews Pocket Informant 2007”

1. 1 Judie Lipsett Hughes Jul 29th, 2007 at 6:54 pm

   Pffft! No need to be kind. Read the review. If you agree with me say so; if not, say why.

2. 2 alex_kac Jul 29th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

   Hi Judie Obviously I don’t agree with all of it. I feel there are some factual errors - mostly on the memory comments, though also on comparisons with certain features like grouping vs filtering and PI filtering vs WM5/6 filtering. I also take issue with the WM PO apps having many improvements over the last 7 years. I feel they have been very stagnant with few new features or improvements. The Calendar views are nearly useless on Wm5/6. Tasks is pretty useless. Only the Contacts on Wm5/6 is any good.

   I do agree with PI’s settings and intimidation on features at times. I hope the re-think of the PI UI in PI8 will solve that by providing a scalable UI and many other things that focus on ease of use.

   The one thing that concerns me is your speed issues. To be honest, they are not consistent with what I see on my own Wm6 8525 or with what most users I talk to see. I have had maybe a handful of users over the last year see problems like what you are seeing, but when they sent me their data it was super fast. So in those cases I found the problem to be something on their device, but we never could isolate it. The HTC Advantage is too expensive for me to buy just for performance tuning on that one device at this time.

3. 3 alex_kac Jul 29th, 2007 at 10:32 pm

   I just added a nice comparison shot between Pocket Outlook on Wm6 and PI here:

   http://www.pocketinformant.com…..ekView.jpg

4. 4 Judie Lipsett Hughes Jul 30th, 2007 at 8:46 am

   Hi Alex, I replied to your comments over at JAMM and will reprint here:

   Hi Alex, thanks for taking the time to respond. I see I did get you worked up!

   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

5. 5 Clinton Fitch Jul 30th, 2007 at 10:06 am

   This brings up a great point and one that I would love to see developers change in their installers.

   Most devices run applications installed on a memory card slower than in main memory - simple hardware issue and nothing they can do. In most cases the performance drop off between main memory and a storage card is acceptable. Clearly it isn’t always that way…

   If developers know that their application is going to take a big performance hit or drop in stability, a warning in the install process would be a great benefit to them and to the user. A good example is Spb with Spb Pocket Plus. It tells you right up front that if you install it on a storage card that it may not perform reliably. In my mind this takes them completely off the tech support hook: If I install it on a card and it doesn’t perform well, it is my problem because I didn’t follow the “best practice”

   I really would like to see more developers do this on applications, especially big ones like PI7.

6. 6 alex_kac Jul 30th, 2007 at 10:11 am

   Hey Judie - back.

   1) Actually being in ROM it would be a bit slower because loading/executing from ROM is slower than RAM. However, in Wm2003 there was an execute in place which means it may not have had to load the binary into memory. But yes, to be honest Wm2003 was a much faster platform at the expense of being able to lose all your data with battery drain.

   2) We don’t recommend PI on a storage card for two reasons: First is that it slows things down, second is it may cause system crashes on some devices if you start PI from a hardware key because the OS does not deal with unmounted file systems and launching apps on them from a hardware key very well. It has nothing to do with “optimizing apps to run on a storage card”. This is a WM system issue. I can’t make their drivers work well for that. You can take a 5k “Hello World” app and put it on a storage card and then assign it to a hardware key and on over 50% of the devices out there it will freeze the device when you press that hardware key.

   Second, the only way to “optimize” for a storage card is to make the binary smaller to make less code have to load from the storage card. SD cards are 4-bit pathways compared to 32-bit for memory so raw transfer speed isn’t going to be that fast. So its going to take 8x longer to grab 2MB of data from a storage card than it would from something in main memory. There is no magic programmer wand to take care of this. Especially on a VGA device which requires double the resource sizes as other devices.

   So while you aren’t a programmer, you do use PDAs and should be aware of how technical limitations of the PDA itself affect applications. Comparing an app you have installed on a storage card and one in ROM is hobbling one and not the other.

7. 7 alex_kac Jul 30th, 2007 at 10:35 am

   Great idea Clinton! Its so simple, I don’t know why I never thought of that. Honestly. We used to put it in the desktop installers but most people hated extra dialogs so we took it out. I’ll add this to the PI installer pronto.

8. 8 Clinton Fitch Jul 30th, 2007 at 10:42 am

   Alex,

   I can understand removing it from the desktop installer - and would agree with that actually as most people blow by them anyway.

   With it being on the device though the user HAS to read it as it stops the install process until confirmation or cancellation is inputed. It give you (and any other developer) a “get out of jail” card in essence. You warned us and we accepted.

9. 9 Judie Lipsett Hughes Jul 30th, 2007 at 10:44 am

   I like this idea, too.

10. 10 alex_kac Jul 30th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    I’ve just now put this into the installer for PI8 and PI 2007 Rev 5 (the final version of that).

11. 11 Clinton Fitch Jul 30th, 2007 at 10:52 am

    Brilliant! I can’t see this doing anything but helping.

12. 12 Doug Goldring Jul 30th, 2007 at 11:01 am

    I agree. This is a fantastic idea.

    Doug

Since I have been writing here at Gear Diary, and at JAMM, I have had the opportunity to test numerous Bluetooth headsets. I love the freedom that Bluetooth gives you to talk on your phone without tying up your hands. On the other hand, I hate having a piece of plastic stuck on my face all the time (especially one with an annoying flashing blue light). To me, the ideal Bluetooth headset must find a middle ground between these two interests: allowing me to easily use it to place and receive calls, while remaining unobtrusive and accessible when not in use.

This is essentially the challenge which SoundID posed to some of the world’s top acoustic scientists and engineers when they developed the SM100. Ever since I learned of this new company, I have eagerly anticipated the result. Now that the SoundID headset is available, let’s take a closer and find out if it lived up to my expectations, or fizzled out in a hiss of static.

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Over the last couple of months I have been hooked on YouTube. I visited the web site every day, watched more than 500 videos and even posted my own. On my travels through YouTube, I came across some really awesome videos that I feel Gear Diary readers will enjoy watching. I narrowed them down to a group of twenty and here they are:

“I Love You Cause I Have To”
The girls who post music videos under the username “HoiTahPoiSha,” make some of the best creative videos I have ever seen. The editing and choreography are great!

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And how!

As the United States gets ready for what is shaping up to be a more interesting presidential race than usual, one company has decide to go for broke with what has to be the most amusing piece of political memorabilia I’ve ever seen…a Hillary Clinton Nutcracker.

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Radio-controlled helicopters are cool toys and the manufacturers are still making new models and evolving them to include new and better features. When HobbyTron.com approached Gear Diary to review the new HobbyTron.com branded Hornet 3 mini RC helicopter, Judie thought immediately of me and asked me if I wanted to review it. I said yes! So, I guess I am now the resident RC helicopter pilot around here.

Review updated July 22, 2007: Added video of the Hornet 3.

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[Note: This is a joint review between Just Another Mobile Monday and Gear Diary; it is being simultaneously posted on both sites. Doug’s comments appear in black normal typeface. Judie’s comments appear in blue italics typeface]

Even if you have never used a device branded by HTC, you have probably used an HTC device. Most of the popular Pocket PC’s available today were designed and manufactured by HTC, including: the Dell Axim, the HP iPaq, and the Palm Treo (to name only a few). So, it came as little surprise when HTC began branding devices on their own, or that their self branded Pocket PC’s would became some of the most popular devices on the market. Their latest offering, the Sprint Mogul by HTC (otherwise known as the PPC-6800) is no exception.

I will admit that I was a bit of a skeptic when it came to this phone. Its predecessor, the PPC-6700 had been much maligned. The general consensus seemed to be that the PPC-6700 looked great, but looks can be deceiving.

I was one of those that bought an HTC Apache or PPC 6700, and after the grand excitement of “Hey! A Windows Mobile phone that is available for Sprint!” wore off, what I was left with was a PDA that had phone capabilities, but that wasn’t all that great of a PDA nor was it all that great of a phone. It was a thick and blocky device that came with memory issues, finish issues, and other quirks that eventually drove me to a different PDA phone altogether. That’s not to say that I didn’t like or appreciate the sliding keyboard form factor, but in several ways the 6700 just felt like an unfinished product.

So, when I first began seeing early reports of the Mogul, I was probably not the only one who saw nothing more than a Sprint phone with a sliding keyboard and thought, “Yippee an update of the underwhelming PPC-6700. ” Frankly, I was prepared to be unimpressed.

Well, I was feeling a bit more kindly towards the idea of the Mogul because I had reviewed a very similar device which had been a substantial upgrade to the Apache / Wizard form factor, the HTC Hermes / Dopod 838Pro. I had been suitably impressed with the difference a year had brought to the sliding keyboard, so I was confident that almost a year later, the Mogul would be even better.

To the contrary, however, I was quickly impressed by how well the Mogul worked as it became an essential part of my daily routine. In fact, the Mogul (which is the first PPC phone edition or Pocket PC Professional Edition I have ever used) became even more a part of my routine than my trusted Dell Axim ever was. Far from simply being the new version of the PPC-6700, the Mogul represents a complete overhaul of every feature of the device. Sprint was smart to distance this phone from its predecessor by making it the Mogul instead of the ubiquitous PPC-6800.

In addition to offering a fantastic hardware package, the Mogul is also the first CDMA phone to offer Windows Mobile 6 Operating System (as I mentioned, in this case it is the Professional Edition). Of course, I am referring to Windows Mobile 6 as the operating system which it was designed to use, and not one of the many soup kitchen hack job operating systems that have been floating around the Internet lately. As such, in addition to closely scrutinizing the important features of this device, we will also be taking a look at the Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition Operating System. Unlike many reviews, however, we will not be looking at a lot of the technical specifications or giving a detailed overview of the box contents. For that information, I would invite you to take a look at Doug’s Unboxing Post, Judie’s First Look Video, or the Sprint Mogul Fact Sheet.

I figure just about everyone has either held a Treo or at least seen one, so this picture should help give an idea of how small the Mogul actually is. Fortunately, it is not so small as to be unusuable.

next to the Treo 700wx

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted “Transformers Invade the Nintendo DS”, about the coming games Transformers Autobots and Decepticons for the Nintendo DS. Well the games were released, and last weekend I picked up the games.

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