Windows Phone Thoughts: PIMping up your Pocket PC -- Agenda Fusion vs. Pocket Informant

Installation
Both use the standard Activesync Install routines, requiring download to, then execution of the installation from the desktop PC. PI’s routine gives you the option to install Category Icons (505K), Colour Schemes (48K) and PhatNotes Lite. PhatNotes, which is used as the editor for Journal and Alarm Notes) requires 782K of memory, in addition to the 3.5M required for PI. Be forewarned however, that adding the Category Icons and Colour Schemes will add about 375 files to your My Documents folder which will then have to be synchronized with the desktop if you have File Sync activated. PI’s installation routine also gives the option to install trial versions of WebIS Mail and Correct Time (355K total). I installed everything to my CF card and everything seemed to work fine. I did notice a number of times that upon tapping on the calendar on the Today screen after initial power up, that PI would report a missing application. Usually, this was cured with a soft reset.

AF also gives you the option of installing Category Icons, requiring approximately the same memory space as PI, but without creating the huge number of files in the My Documents folder.

Initial Set-up
AF and PI come pre-configured with default parameters. There are a considerable number of these user-configurable parameters in both programs so it would be a good idea to peruse them as well, as you begin working with each. Both AF and PI use a similar context sensitive panel approach to display and configure program parameters. The top half of the screen provides a drop-down selection of the various types of parameters (usually separated by View). Once a selection is made, the bottom half changes to display the current settings for parameters associated with that group. Tapping on a setting in the bottom half provides the options to change it.


Figure 1: Comparison screenshot of configuration screens PI and AF. Click on the thumbnail for a larger picture.

Access to these settings screens is accomplished by selecting the AF icon in the system tray at the bottom of the screen, then tapping the Options... menu item. Similarly, in PI, you select the PI icon in the system tray, which pops up the Tools menu, from which you select options. PI also has context sensitive pop-up menus from within each view as well. In many cases, the ability to change the settings for the displayed view is available directly from here. PI also has an Options menu icon (a globe) in the system tray.