Sunday, November 26, 2006

If there is an standard built-in application on Windows Mobile Pocket PCs that has been cursed as much as it is loved, it could very well be the Notes application.  Notes has been around in the Pocket PC PIM (Personal Information Manager) since the early days of the platform with the idea and intention of being able to synchronize with your desktop's Microsoft Outlook so these notes can be viewed and/or shared.  While this worked by-and-large, the lack of features within the Notes application itself tended to make users shy away from it.  The lack of features included things such as being able to bullet items, change font faces (bold or italic), easy exportation of files and many others.

The answer for these needs and a more robust notes application has been addressed by PhatWare with their application PhatNotes Professional.  PhatNotes was originally released in 1998 as HPC Notes (which is still available for you H/PC owners) and has rapidly matured over the past 8 years.  Now named PhatNotes and in version 4.7, the application has matured to fit the needs of most savvy notes users with a wide range of formatting and intelligent features that make the application, in my opinion, second-to-none.  With PhatNotes you are able to quickly and easily organize your notes into categories, insert smart text such as dates and times with one tap, format your test and created bulleted lists, sync with your desktop PC via ActiveSync, insert audio, photos, links to another note into a note just to name a few of the powerful features in the application.  Plus, if you need to share your note with someone else, you can export it to a standard text file (.txt).  All-in-all, if you are a serious user of Notes you should look at PhatWare's PhatNotes Professional as the natural extension of the somewhat basic built-in application.

PhatNotes Professional is installed via ActiveSync on your Windows Mobile Pocket PC and requires approximately 920KB of storage space in your device's main memory or on a Storage Card.  You will need Pocket PC 2002, 2003, 2003SE or Windows Mobile 5 in order to use PhatNotes.  For this review I used PhatNotes Professional which includes a desktop version of PhatNotes as well.  This requires approximately 25MB of disk space on your PC and will work with any Windows Operating System Windows 98 or higher.  Note that this Windows PC component only comes with the Professional version of PhatNotes and synchronization between your device and desktop are done via these applications.  If you want to synchronize your notes on your device with notes in Outlook you will need to use PhatNotes Standard.  Keep in mind though that you will loose the formatting benefits that I outline in this review if you sync with Outlook as Outlook cannot understand it.

Figure 1:  The PhatNotes Professional Windows PC Interface

When PhatNotes is started the applications file explorer is displayed.  From here you can either select a note file to open or you can create a new file by tapping the New softkey.  When you open a new note you are taken to the main display of PhatNotes which is simple and uncluttered, much like the native notes application.  A key feature to PhatNotes however is the ability to put your notes in a category.  The pull-down menu offers you a wide range of categories including documents, meeting notes, letters and so forth.  The idea behind this is to quickly and easily allow you to categories your notes so you can quickly find them, especially if you use PhatNote's category sorting feature.  Once a category is chosen an a subject is entered for the note, you can begin typing your note in the main area of the interface.

Figure 2:  PhatNotes Category Selection

It is at this point that the differences between the native notes application and PhatNotes begins to be clearly seen.  PhatNotes allows for formatting and bulleting of text within the note that is simply not an option in the default application.  For example, you can bold, underline or italicize any text, can format the paragraph to be left justified, centered or right justified,  and create a bulleted list of items in the note.  It is essentially a mini word processor!  It is this level of detail that you can put into a note that can make you more productive.  For example, if you are in a meeting using PhatNotes Professional (on your mobile device or PC) and bold an items, you know that it was an important item or an item that you need to follow up on.  No longer are you left second-guessing what was or was not important.

Figure 3:  The Various Formatting Options in PhatNotes

In addition to the formatting available, you have the ability to insert a variety of items into a note as well.  First, you can insert the date and/or time into a note from the Menu>Date & Time menu on your device.  In my use I find this is always the first thing I put into a note so when I review it later I know exactly when the notes were taken, especially for a meeting or conference call.  Second, from the Menu>Insert menu you have a whole range of items you can insert into a note.  From this menu you can insert another file, an image, a link to another note or a PhatPad file (read my review of PhatPad 3 by clicking this link), a voice note, a contact, appointment or task.  Simply put, there isn't much you can't put into a PhatNotes note! 

One of the key aspects of PhatNotes that I use is the ability to insert a contacts information.  When I choose to insert this into a note by using the Menu>Insert menu, I am connected to my contacts application and choose the contact that I need to insert.  All of the contact information I have on that contact is inserted into the note including phone numbers, email address, physical address and so forth.  This is very handy when sharing my notes with someone else who may or may not have that contact's information.

Figure 4:  The Insert Time Feature

Figure 5:  Insert A Variety of Items into a PhatNote

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