Jason Spencer – GPS For Success

As everyone knows, the world of smart phone applications is constantly inundated with new applications, apps promising better features to enhance your productivity and change your life. Sadly to say, some often come with hefty price tags and offer little in return, but empty promises. Time management paradigms aside, the reality is that there is only so many ways that a programmer can create a calendar and a task manager, before it becomes a test in futility. Remember the old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results and that is exactly what a number of these developers are doing.

Many mobile PIMs  (Personal Information Managers) are either too stripped down or over wrought with unnecessary features and have a user interface that is kludgy at best.  The reality is that a good UI designer when porting an application’s interface to a new environment should take into account the unique advantages of the mobile device that they are designing for, rather than trying to create a one size fits all application. One example of bad design or at least poor programming is the opera mini on the AT&T Blackberry Bold 9000, although fast on a number of other cell phones—it runs painfully slow on the Blackberry Bold 9000, making it highly undesirable. (Note the full Opera Mobile browser on a AT&T Tilt 2 running Windows Mobile 6.5 flies and is utterly amazing.)  Other applications include any number of web applications on the Blackberry and iPhone that simply create a front-door to a preexisting web application, making these free applications often nothing more than glorified web site short cut links.

For these reasons alone, I found a refreshing difference recently when I was invited by Yuriy Savchenko, the Project Manager for WebIS’s Blackberry development team out of Kiev, to join their beta testing team. I found a completely different approach to product management and programming development at WebIS. They are a company that cares not only about the quality of their products, but actually about their end-user’s experience.

As many Blackberry Developers know, there has been serious synchronization issues for third party app developers with RIM’s Blackberry Desktop Manger 5.01 and Yuriy’s  team tackled these problems ferociously  creating what  I have come to see as a world class application.  I believe that Pocket Informant 2.01 for the Blackberry is a serious game changer in the development of RIM mobility applications.  First off,  WebIS CEO Alex Kac and his team under Savchenko have done a superb job of porting  Pocketing Informant  from the Windows Mobile Platform to the Blackberry.

Any long term user on the Blackberry knows that RIM is famous for its shortcut keys  and Pocket Informant’s  speed keys on the Blackberry are where the application begins to shine. Learning these shortcut  keys turn Pocket Informant into a worthy, if not far superior alternative to the Blackberry’s native PIM applications.   Using Pocket Informant’s short cut keys is a  powerful option because Pocket Informant allows  a user to access their tasks, their journal notes, their calendar and their contacts all from  a single highly customizable user interface that can be easily modified to your heart’s content. Here’s the real kicker, Pocket Informant’s short cut keys are also fully customizable allowing the user the ability to define which buttons launch which PIM functions.

Pocket Informant also works with any of the major time management systems from David Allen’s Getting Things Done to Stephen Covey’s First Things First.  In fact, Pocket Informant actually comes with GTD  and Franklin Covey preconfigured settings built right into it. Pocket Informant is the de facto mobile standard application on Windows Mobile and now the Blackberry for Franklin Covey’s PlanPlus mobility solution.  For example, a mobile license for it now ships with Plan Plus. The Franklin Covey tools include the weekly compass, goals, projects, mission statements and daily notes functionality pre-built in. These settings can be turned on and off in the Pocket Informant options tab which is so customizable that the feature list alone could fill up multiple blog entries.  The daily notes actually sync with Microsoft Outlook’s journal application—a feature that some mobility developers actually develop and sell separate applications for.

Pocket Informant 2 can fully sync with or exist separately from the  blackberry native PIM database (allowing for a person to carry around two separate sets of information – one for personal and one for professional information) giving the end user more options.

In conclusion, I encourage every Blackberry user to test drive the new Pocket Informant PIM application as it hands down one of the best blackberry applications on the market today.