Though an original beta tester for Agendus for Windows Mobile, and an owner of a Pro license for it, I am still using Pocket Informant 2007 on my own devices.
There are still several issues that prevent me from using Agendus as my PIM.
- You cannot assign Agendus as the default PIM. You must open it manually whenever you want to use it.
- On most devices the default PIM hardware buttons will still open Pocket Outlook instead of Agendus.
- You cannot use any of the Pocket PC icons that you presently use with most other PPC applications. You must purchase separate icon sets from iambic. They are in the usual Agendus icon format - all in the set are part of a database and you have to load the entire database to use any.
- Since I already owned all of the Agendus iconsets available, I installed them and tried to use them. But as soon as I did, Agendus immediately uses up all available memory and the device becomes non-responsive. Turns out that Agendus attempts to load the entire icon database (the Platinum Iconset consists of more than 15,000 icons!), thus eating up every last bit of the PPC's memory. So my additional icons purchased from iambic are completely non-usable. This bug was reported by me very early in the beta, but has yet to be resolved. Actually, it still has yet to be addressed at all. Their development team claims that they have other, more important issues on the list ahead of that.
- Another icon problem - when you assign an icon to a category, it is only assigned to any new events that you create within Agendus. This means that my existing 600 contacts do not have any icons assigned, not to mention all of my existing tasks and appointments. They have been aware of this since early in the beta also, and it is also staying low on the priority list, even though it makes my preferred month view by icon worthless for now.
A moderator on their forum recommended that I delete all of my existing contacts and events on my desktop PC, and then restore them to try and "trick" Agendus into assigning icons to these. Needless to day, I don't feel that this is a reasonable recommendation at all, and should never be made by anyone representing the developer. And, no - I did not try it.
- Agendus does not pick up any of the photos that you have assigned to contacts in Outlook - either on your device or on your desktop. You must separately assign them within Agendus.
- Once you go ahead and assign photos to your contacts within Agendus, there is no photo-view for contacts! The only time you can see the photo is if you open that particular contact. And that was just added recently. Just a few weeks ago, I could only see the contact photos if I was in the edit mode for a contact.
- Initially, online services like weather and "Quote of the Day" would not update automatically. Instead you had to first establish a connection and then manually tell it to update. But, you say, my device is a PPC Phone and therefore is always connected! Yep. But they didn't think of that. On my Cingular 8125 I always had to manually "start" the connection - even though it already was connected. What I was really oing was tricking Agendus into "thinking" that I was just starting the connection so that it would update the weather on the Today View.
Some of the above may have fixes out - I haven't checked yet this week or last. And when I mention that the Manual Connection Requirement was a problem, that's because I see that they claim to have fixed that now, though I saw quite a few users posting that it was still not working for them yet.
All in all, I had much higher expectations for this program. Having used Agendus for Palm and loved it, I figured that the Windows Mobile and its broader media robustness would make Agendus for WM a true killer app. However they decided, in my opinion, to release it as what most PPC developers would never consider a release-ready condition. This is not even as polished as an early, rough PI private beta. But iambic had already started selling full licenses for this application early in the beta program - which is not a normal situation at all. Apparently they will only commit a relatively small amount of funding to get Windows Mobile programs started, and then the design team is expected to get something ready that will at least generate revenue - even of it is not-quite-ready-for-primetime yet.
And in my opinion, this PIM is not.