Now rocking up to version 10, Agendus is a stable, featured-packed integrated PIM application for the Palm OS.
Bolting on a ton of extra functionality to the standard, built-in Contacts, Calendar, Memos and To Do applications on the Palm, Agendus offers a hugely flexible interface that can be tailored to suit the way you work.
Despite the power lurking under the hood, it’s easy to get up and running with Agendus, and compared to the complex and sometimes confusing interfaces of Pocket Informant on the Pocket PC, this program is miles ahead when it comes to usability.
Treo-tastic
Although it works on any Palm handheld, Agendus has been optimised for the Palm Treo‘s five way controller, making it easy to do most actions one-handed.
Unlike our experiences on the Pocket PC, the tight integration with the Palm’s hardware buttons meant that we rarely found ourselves reaching for the stylus when looking up diary dates, contacts, notes, or making calls.
In fact, just about every element of the program seems intuitively thought out, with lots of nice touches reflecting the developer’s attention to detail.
Calendar view
The calendar offers a huge variety of attractive views, including a handy ‘Today’ screen showing user-customisable slots for meetings, tasks, calls, email, weather, quote of the day and ‘this day in history.
When it comes to inputting data, Agendus offers a positive cornucopia of ways of getting information on to your handheld.
When adding a new appointment, for example, you can add invitees, assign categories, sketch a note, add a custom icon, add a voice message and photo – with all these options being accessible through a clear and concise interface.
And if you have to leave the office for the meeting, you can use Agendus to check the weather at your destination, look up a map and get directions.
Agendus also adds small weather forecast icons on the date bars for the forthcoming week ahead. Talking of icons, there’s also a built in icon-designer onboard so that you can create your own – loads of fun!
New for version 10 is a ‘contact networking’ feature, which allows you to link contacts together by identifying relationship types like assistant, coworker, friend, relative, and spouse.
Multiple relationships can be assigned to the same contact and the list is customisable, so you could add new categories like, “Fellow Borg” or “Desperate Drinker.”
Contacts view
Contacts can be grouped, sorted and filtered using ‘commonalities’ like company, post code, city or your own custom combination.
A neat touch lets Treo users take a photo with the built in camera, crop it to size from within the app and then assign the photo to a contact.
Birthday reminders can also be set to start nagging you into gift buying mode before the day, and maps for contact addresses can be looked up via the Palm’s web browser or via the third party Mapopolis program.
If you’re the type who quickly forgets who you met, contacts can be linked to events to build a contact history, exportable as a CSV file.
To Do view
Agendus really goes to town on the To Do interface, with its cool sounding ‘Time Matrix’ letting you sort tasks by urgency and importance as well as set alarms, attach icons, create voice recordings and append sketches.
You can also associate photos with tasks – so if you’re quaffing an ace new beer when you’re out on the town, you could snap a picture of the name on the pump and then attach it to a new To Do saying, “Urgent! Buy lots more of this stuff!”
There’s also a basic project management interface onboard letting you organise complex tasks with hierarchical To Do items and set task ‘roll over’ status.
Memos view
We were really disappointed with the way that the Windows Mobile platform handles memos – something that the Palm has always done better, in our opinion – and Agendus has managed to put further distance between the two platforms.
The beefed-up memos app serves up a vast range of productivity-boosting memo options, including categories, contact linking, icon support, coloured text, voice memos, photo attachment and – of course – the ability to add a sketch.
Conclusion
The whole point of carrying around a PIM is that you should be able to access and input information quickly on the move, and this is where Agendus steals a march on its rivals.
Using a Treo smartphone, we were able to easily move from app to app, check appointments, look up contacts and quickly make calls using just one hand – which meant we used the thing a lot more than our i-mate JAM which was a far more fiddly affair.
Smart, modern, fast and fun, Agendus represents astonishing value at $29.95 for the standard edition and $39.95 for the pro (see feature comparison here: Agendus Standard vs Agendus Pro) and it’s the best Personal Information Manager we’ve used on any platform.
It’s that good. Really.
Features: 95%
Ease of use: 90%
Value For Money: 90%
Overall: 94%
So you’ve shelled out for your new smartphone/PDA and you’re ready to watch your productivity soar as you strut around with an office in your pocket.
Like most annoyingly compelling games, Bejeweled is dead simple to play and takes seconds to learn.
In the original Bejeweled (available on Palm, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile) there’s an additional timed mode to add a frantic air to the gameplay, while its sequel, Bejeweled2 (available on Palm and Pocket PC), ramps up the bells and whistles offering four play modes, bonus play modes, explosive Power Gems, Hyper Cubes and Time Bombs and arcade-style noisy effects (which can be turned off).
You can download trial versions of both games from 
If, like the Temptations, you find yourself wishing it would rain or you just like to belt out tunes in the shower, Pioneer’s new waterproof headphones might be just the things for you.
Of course, there’s no point having waterproof headphones if your player gets slippery when wet, so anyone looking to go surfin’ USA might be interested in checking out the range of waterproof iPod/iriver cases from h2o Audio.
Dell has released a beast of a notebook, with its dual-core processor, groovy glowing lights and ramped-up video RAM aiming the XPS M1710 squarely at mobile gamers.
The Metallic Black M1710 weighs in at a wallet-draining $2,600 and comes with Intel’s Core Duo T2400 processor, 1GB of DDR2 memory, 256MB GeForce Go 7900 GS graphics and a 60GB hard drive.
Both notebooks feature Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition operating system, and system upgrades can expand storage to 120 of GB hard drive space and up to 4 GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory.
There’s also built in Wi-Fi, high definition integrated stereo with two 2 watt per channel main speakers and a 5 watt, class D subwoofer with bass reflex port.
The XPS M1710 is estimated to ship in the second week of May. EK/EU delivery and prices to be announced.
After putting the book on subtle design through the shredder, Pure’s designers have come up with the dazzling new Pure One, a DAB digital radio for under £50 – in bright pink.
The scrolling text monochrome display shows station name, status icons, time and signal strength, with one touch tuning giving quick access to 20 DAB and FM (with RDS) stations.
Supported by a full 2-year warranty, the Pure One will be available from May 2006.
We have to say that if we strutted down the local boozer with an MP3 player strapped on around our neck, we’d most likely be called a lot of things – some of which might just rhyme with ‘Anchor’ – but, hey! – what do we know about yoof product design?!
Dominating the iRiver is a large, 4 Line, 16 tone greyscale OLED screen, which displays EQ settings, track listings and folder views, and also doubles up as a clock/alarm clock.
There’s also an FM radio onboard – pretty crucial, that – with iRiver quoting a MP3 playback battery life of around 13 hours per charge (128kbps, MP3, volume level 20, EQ Normal, LCD Off).
Although a well equipped smartphone or PDA can let you leave the laptop at home, bashing away at those itty-bitty keypads or attempting to write lengthy emails with a fiddly stylus can soon become a chore.
Before use, a small driver has to be installed on your handheld device – as well as getting the two devices chatting to each other, it also lets you set up user programmable shortcut and command keys for fast access to applications.
Although we had no problem maintaining the IR link, one of our test units (a Treo 650) felt a little wobbly on the cradle – using an imate JAM Pocket PC in landscape mode felt a lot more secure, as did our Sony TH55 PDA (one of the best PDAs even invented, but that’s a different story).
Specifications
Pioneer have announced their new AVIC-S1 pocket GPS system for the European market.
Built in microphone
AVIC-S1 specs
Filez
CSpotRun
AvantGo
Combining an application launcher with the Today screen, Spb Pocket Plus is designed to add a heap of functionality to your Windows Mobile 2003/5 device.
It has to be said that some of the ‘extended themes’ are something of an acquired taste, but SPB have thoughtfully created a Webpage instructing enthusiastic users on how to create their own.
Conveniently, the program can be run off a storage card to save device memory and there’s a ‘Safe Mode’ to help sort out any rogue software causing problems – just like its big brother, this only loads a basic set of drivers on start-up.