Pocket PC Thoughts: The 'PI' eater? -- A look at Agendus for Windows Mobile v1.01

Introduction
From what I understand on the forums, Agendus and its predecessor, ActionNames, have been part of the Palm OS world for quite a while. So, bringing a product with this heritage to the Windows Mobile platform brings up interesting questions. “How much of its Palm-centered functionality can it retain?” and “Can it compete with mature PIM applications which have grown up natively on the PPC/WM platform?” Well, let's take a look...

Two versions of Agendus are available. The Standard Edition provides all the capabilities we have come to expect from a PIM, but spends more time and effort in the Contacts management area (more on this later). For a little bit more money, you can acquire the Professional Edition which provides Over-The-Air update capability plus better management of appointment attendees and call roll-overs. The Professional Edition also supports font-effects (underline, strike-through, etc.) for calls, tasks, and appointments. To be honest, I wasn't sure exactly what 'Over-The-Air' updates meant, but I think it refers to the ability of Agendus to make use of available Internet connections to gather updates for weather, quotes, etc. to the Agenda view and obtaining maps for contact addresses.

Although I won't be able to go through all the features of Agendus or compare them to PI and AF in this review, I hope to give you a good idea of the basic flow of the application and its overall capabilities.

Installation
Installation of Agendus is simple and straightforward, using the typical Activesync-engaging executable on the PC. I didn't see an option for a downloadable .CAB file on the Iambic web site.

Like other PIMs, Agendus uses the same database as Outlook, so navigation from screen to screen is fairly brisk. When first starting up, there is a very short (1 to 2 second) initialization routine. The default when you first start Agendus is the Agenda view, which looks considerably different from the version in Outlook, but not so much from what we have come to expect from third party PIMS. Included in the view are appointments for the current (and next days), tasks (current and future) and other general information such as Quotes, Historic Facts and Local Weather.


Figure 1: First starting up Agendus.

Along the bottom of the screen is the tray of icons which act as 'fast keys' to the various parts of the application. Iambic has done a good job of selecting intuitive icons so it's relatively easy guess where each of these goes. From left to right, they are Agenda View, Daily View, Weekly View, and Monthly View. Each of these can be customized to a couple of options, but we'll go into that in more detail later. Then comes Contacts (silhouette), Tasks (checkmark), and Email (envelope). On the Day, Week and Month views, an additional icon with an arrow pointing to the calendar brings up a date selector for moving to a particular date.


Figure 2: Date Selector. Note there are a number of ways provided to move around the calendar. The apostrophes show which days have activities on them.

Unfortunately, just tapping on the desired day doesn't take you to the Day view. You have to tap the Done button on the bottom of the screen.

The Magnifying Glass is, of course, the Search routine, and the Screwdriver brings up what would be known as the Preferences screen in other applications.