With the release of Windows Mobile 5.0, the suite of Office applications were greatly improved.  Still, in many cases, the “mobile” experience is vastly different from the “desktop” experiencing.  This is particularly true of the “Outlook” associated applications in Windows Mobile devices.  The suite of applications; Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Tasks, are functional but do not have the level of flexibility as their desktop counterparts.  Fortunately there is a solution. 

WebIS has recently released a new version of their award winning application Pocket Informant.  This new version, Pocket Informant 2005, takes Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks to a level that is far closer to the “desktop” experience.  While Pocket Informant 2005 does not address Messaging – that is done with WebIS’ Mail 2 – it does offer a robust experience for the other three Office suite functions.  Because of the wide range of customizable options and a rich feature set, Pocket Informant is a must-have application for any Windows Mobile power user. 

Pocket Informant is installed on your Windows Mobile device via ActiveSync and requires approximately 1.3MB of storage space on your device.  The application can be installed in either your devices memory or on a Storage Card but it is recommended by WebIS that you install it directly into your devices memory.  Once installed, Pocket Informant will become your default application for Calendar, Contacts and Tasks.  Further, if your device has Calendar, Contact and Task hardware buttons, you can customize your Windows Mobile device to use Pocket Informant instead of the default versions.  To do this, go to Start>Settings>Buttons on your device and select the “PI” versions of the applications such as “PIContacts” for Contacts.  Likewise, when Pocket Informant is installed on a Windows Mobile 5 device, the Soft Keys on your device’s display can be configured to open the Pocket Informant applications instead of the default ones.

A key feature of Pocket Informant is its ability to seamlessly switch between any of its applications.  So, for example, if you are in Calendar, you can simply tap the Next Tab soft key on your device and it will rotate to Contacts and Tasks.  This integration makes it easy and faster to switch between these important PIM functions while also providing you a more integrated experience.  You can also tap the icons at the bottom of the display to go directly to Calendar, Contacts or Tasks without having to tap multiple times with the Next Tab function.  You can do this no matter which applet within Pocket Informant you are using.

When in the Calendar view of Pocket Informant, the Next Tab is used to rotate between the various views that are available to you.  Like the integrated Calendar of Windows Mobile 5, Pocket Informant provides an Agenda, Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly view of your calendar.  In all of the views, you will notice an increase in the amount of information that is available.  I will use the Daily view as my example as this is the mode that I use most on my mobile devices.  In Daily view, two significant changes from the integrated Calendar is the working hours and the daily timeline.

Working hours is defined by you and is represented in the calendar as a shaded area throughout the hours designated as working hours.  For example, my working hours are set for 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM each day.  As you can see in Figure 3, these hours are shaded while the hours after 5:00 PM are not.  This feature functions much like the work day feature of Outlook on your PC.  However, this setting is not synchronized to your device so you will have to set it via the Menu>Options menu in Pocket Informant. 

The daily timeline, like working hours, is a quick and efficient way to see what your schedule contains on any given day.  By representing the entire day in one line, you will see blocks of time throughout the 24 hours of the day that you have something on your agenda.  This timeline is displayed at the top of the Daily view within Calendar and shifts as you use the scroll bars to view the details of the day below.  You will note that your working hours are shaded on the daily timeline as well and by tapping-and-holding, you can create new appointments, tasks, and contacts as well as change your view.

Like all of the of the Pocket Informant applets, Calendar can be highly customized to meet your individual needs.  Customizing can be done globally via the Menu Soft Key then choosing Tools & Settings>Settings…. From here, any aspect of Pocket Informant and its applets can be configured.  It will not take long for you to discover that there is virtually no aspect of the application that cannot be customized to your personal liking.  For example, some of the customizing that can be done is the changing of colors of appointment types, the editing of the work day hours, search views, fonts and font sizes.  This high level of customization makes Pocket Informant stand out for other PIM applications and should satisfy the vast majority of users needs.  Within Calendar itself, you can customize any of the default views to fit your own needs.  This includes the basic colors and fonts but also more detailed things such as filtering and categories.

Beyond the customization, Pocket Informant adds much needed features over the default Calendar application.  These include such things as the ability to drag-and-drop an appointment from one day to another and convert appointments to tasks. 

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