Just Another Mobile Monday Reviews Pocket Informant 2007
Posted on 29 July 2007, at 9:31 pm, by Doug Goldring
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”
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Pffft! No need to be kind. Read the review. If you agree with me say so; if not, say why.
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.
I just added a nice comparison shot between Pocket Outlook on Wm6 and PI here:
http://www.pocketinformant.com…..ekView.jpg
Hi Alex, I replied to your comments over at JAMM and will reprint here:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like this idea, too.
I’ve just now put this into the installer for PI8 and PI 2007 Rev 5 (the final version of that).
Brilliant! I can’t see this doing anything but helping.
I agree. This is a fantastic idea.
Doug