Pocket Informant 9 for Windows Mobile released by Webis

Webis has just released Pocket Informant 9 for Windows Mobile Professional and Windows Mobile Standard. Pocket Informant is my favourite PIM application for many years, and honestly I do believe that this is (one of) the best PIM application(s) available on the market. On the Pocket Informant 9 product page you can read the following description:

“Pocket Informant™ was the first full PIM (personal information management) for Windows Mobile in 2000. Windows Phone 6.5 now offers a more touch-friendly interface and Pocket Informant™ takes advantage of the new system level features to provide swiping and other gestures to maximize your finger friendly usage. With a scalable interface that can go between the touchable finger user interface, to a stylus use interface, all the way to a completely one handed interface Pocket Informant™ 9 works the way you want it to.”

Pocket Informant 9 New Features

You might think that the description implies that there was just focus during the development to take advantage of Windows Mobile 6.5. The feature list below clearly shows that there have been some excellent improvements, which are not Windows Mobile 6.5 related.

Windows Phone 6.5 Support 9 offers support for the new Windows Phone User Interface and data formats;

Getting Things Done (GTD) support in Tasks: (1) Inbox – Collect your tasks quickly, (2) Context Groups, (3) Project Groups, (4) Next Actions;

Starred Tasks Allows you to set a hotlist of tasks that you need to get to or visit quickly across your filters;

New One month Date Picker Based off the full month view giving you easy finger friendly movement and actions;

Free Time Finder In the Month View use the F-T-F to find free time in your schedule for an appointment;

Touch mode improvements throughout the app;

Editors are now touch friendly;

6.5 Only: Swipe left and right in Month View, Week, Date Picker to navigate between time periods;

6.5 Only: Swipe left and right in Editors to navigate between the editor tabs;

Bounce Scrolling;

PNG support Gives you more and better looking icons as well as a size filter within the icon picker;

Many more! There are many new features all over the place in Pocket Informant 9 – try it out to see for yourself!

At first great to see that the Getting Things Done method -originally introduced by David Allen- is applied to tasks management. Since I’m a heavy user of tasks, I really like this improvement, and foremost the ability to group related tasks. In addition there is the improvement to star tasks, to find them quickly. Again a feature that contributes a lot to the daily efficiency of the mobile professional.

But what if I own a Windows Mobile Standard device, without a touchscreen that fully takes advantage of gestures and swipes ?

“The Smartphone version works nearly identically to the Pocket PC version with only the following features not available: 12-key Touch Search, Drag and Drop, Touch Scrolling, Finger Time Picker and New Appointment Timezone. Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone versions are licensed separately. Windows Mobile 2003 is not supported.”

You can see that you still get a lot of new features and improvements for Windows Mobile Standard as well. If you would like to read through a complete list of new features you certainly need to check out the features section on Pocket Informant 9 product page.

Pocket Informant 9 Upgrade Schedule

Personally I do think that Webis provides a fairly reasonable upgrade policy for current Webis Pocket Informant owners:

FREE: Any Full Copy Purchased* On or After August 1 2009;

$10: Purchased Before August 1 2009 or other;

$10: Sidegrade between Pocket PC and Smartphone versions;

Also the full price is reasonable for non Pocket Informant users, since you get a great amount of useful features. Now it is just time to wait for October 6th since: “Windows Phones, Windows Mobile 6.5 & Windows Marketplace hit the market October 6th” What could go wrong if there is such great software already out there !!