Juggling with your time: a close look at Calendar applications on the Nokia E61

When I decided to purchase my E61, I was in the (false) impression that I was getting a "smart" phone which had PIM functionalities built-in, and that I could manage my life with just that. After all, I had spent years doing this with various (PalmOS) PDAs who didn't even claim to be "smart", and I never used Outlook at all, I managed to handle my schedule without even using the Palm Desktop (except recently when I got the opportunity to download my monthly schedule as a vcal file).

I knew from the reviews I had read that the built-in Calendar was... how to put it nicely... "quite basic", but I didn't actually realise how basic. No category support, for instance, makes it hard to integrate in a supposed "pro" device. Hell, it's been a feature of the built-in PalmOS calendar for YEARS!

OK, never mind the builtin calendar application, there must be some alternatives... In fact, until a few weeks (one or two months at best) there was none. AquaCalendar, already well known by users of previous versions of Symbian S60, was then released as a (frequently updated) beta, and more recently there's been at last the long awaited public release of Papyrus for S60 3rd Edition. So now we have two serious contenders for the title of "best Calendar replacement of the year". And the verdict is?

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against either AquaCalendar or Papyrus, but I'll skip the long and detailed software comparison (Steve Litchfield over there at All About Symbian does that kind of in-depth review much better than I would) and jump directly to the conclusions: none of them fits my particular needs. :-(

The first I tried was AquaCalendar. It's author, Valentin, is a very nice guy, respond quickly to requests or questions via both email or discussion boards, and the program is regularly getting better. But the interface was (and still is, to some extent) a bit on the heavy side, both in term of user interaction (multiple button presses are required to edit stuff, which is not always located in a very intuitive way) and in term of graphical design (sure, the color gradient stuff gives beautiful screenshots, but there's no way I could find to disable this graphical effect and get a "simple" and efficient color scheme). There's still room for improvements, and I'm pretty much convinced that it might someday become to my taste... The question is really how long this would take, as I'm in urgent need of an efficient way to handle my schedule!

Next came Papyrus. Simpler interface, professional look (no frills), but a few things don't work quite right at the moment: when I try to associate an icon to a category, for instance, I have to wait about 10 seconds between the moment the "select icon" screen is displayed and the moment the icon list is actually displayed. That's 10 seconds with a blank screen, wondering what's happening, and (the first time) exiting the dialog box thinging it didn't work or that I needed to install icons first. There are a few glitches here and there, but on the average the program seems more polished than AquaCalendar, and its interface design more effective.

Now, what is missing from those two great Calendar replacements to convince me? Not much: a bit of color. But not the kind of color that makes for flashy screenshots with a beautiful theme in the background. No, what I need is simply the ability to decide which color a given day will appear in the month or week view depending on what's on schedule that day.

OK, not everyone will need this, but imagine that you have a schedule divided between "on duty" days where you know you'll be away from home, "off duty" days where, on the opposite, you'll be at home or wherever you wish, and also some "blank days" where at the moment you're more or less "off duty", but could be called if your boss needs you and there's no one else available. The exact time of the day at which I have my assignements doesn't bother me when I first have a look at next month's schedule to decide which evening I'll invite a friend for dinner: all I need, at first, is to know which days I'll be potentially available, and I can get just that by a judicious use of various background colors for every day on the monthly view. Let's look at this example (yeah, I know, 2002 is a bit outdated, but I had to install a PalmOS simulator and fetch an old backup to get some actual data and make a screenshot):
A single look to that view lets me know that except for March 1st, which is "blank" and as such not 100% sure to remain empty, the rest of the month is either in blue (holidays), green (off duty days) or red (on duty days). So I know immediately which days I will or won't be available for a dinner with friends. Now, if no green/blue day is found that matches my friends's schedule, then I'll have to examine closely the red days to find out if I'm passing an occasional night at home between two assignments, or if the last day in a red block ends soon enough to be compatible with a dinner, and at that moment colors doens't bring much help...



This screenshot shows a nice (Japanese) program called TakoSche, but similar results could be achieved with other PalmOS tools, though of course not the builtin Calendar application.



Now if you look at the following screenshot, Papyrus color scheme is quite simple: every day background is the same color except for week-ends (shown in blue) or days belonging to the previous or next month (gray). I have nothing against showing some days in gray if they don't belong to this month, although I can get the same information by reading the day number in the box. And as far as week-end days are concerned, the rightmost column will always be for Sundays, and the one just to its left for Saturdays, so the color here doesn't IMHO bring any unseful information.



And Aquacalendar's color scheme is a bit harder to understand: no special color (here I have a background image set which gives a somewhat confusing result as far as colors go), except some days shown in a bluish color, I suspect that those contain some repetitive entries but couldn't find out for sure how it works, and anyway it's blue ot nothing.

It took some time for me to find out how to select icons in Papyrus (the 10 seconds issue mentioned above), so I was too lazy to perform other screenshots with icons, and they are smaller and uglier than AquaCalendar ones - though they convey the same quantity of informations, and it's true that I was able to get both programs display tiny icons in the monthly view to get an idea about what was happening that day. Not as efficient as background color, but better than nothing.

So all in all, both Papyrus and AquaCalendar add nice, advanced features to the Calendar application (features which, unfortunately I'm not using much if at all except for categories), but they also make typing a new entry an even longer process than with the builtin application, and they don't provide background colors which I have become used to and am missing sorely since I sold my Treo 600 almost two years ago. The net result is that I'm still using the default Calendar application, and enduring its shortcomings, because it's faster and bug-free than the replacement apps...

A good Memopad application... or the lack thereof!

One thing that never ceases to surprise me is the weakness of the S60 built-in PIM applications. In another post I'll post my thoughts about the calendar application and possible replacements, but today I'm going to focus on the Notes application and its alternatives.

To make things clear and honest, I'm a long time PalmOS user and recent Symbian switcher, so I'm quite used to PalmOS's Memopad application, which although basic was already a very useful program on its own.

I've used Memopad (or more recently a more powerful variant, PsMemo) for years, and have more than two hundred notes in the database, which I would have loved to transfer easily to the E61, but wasn't able to. Blame it on me for not using Outlook on my PC, the result is that all the notes are still in my Palm Desktop, waiting for me.

The good news is that had I been able to get them on the E61, it wouldn't have helped much, as the built-in Notes application feature no such things as categories, a lookup field, or even a search function. All in all, I'd have been stuck with plenty of data and no way to access to the needed bits of informations I carry...

So here I am with my problem, thinking "Oh, well, surely I'm not the first PalmOS->Symbian switcher and this issue must have been solved by a clever programer with the adjunction of a third party applicaton. I open my browser and head for the usual places (my-symbian, all-about-symbian, handango or symbiangear, to name only the first ones) only to discover that the choice of alternative Notes replacement applications is quite limited: none at all! :-(

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting dozens of apps, but I stupidly thought that maybe two or three such applications would fill this niche market. A cruel disillusion it was. :-(

So, is there simply no Notes replacement at all for Symbian devices, or is it just a question of waiting for the developers to port their existing apps to S60 3rd Edition?

Fortunately, there are a couple of existing note-taking applications for Symbian S60, it's just that they're not yet compatible with its 3rd edition. For instance, SafeNote for S60 seems a perfect candidate for my need: categories, sorting, even a password & encryption to protect sensitive data. But then, it's only available for S60 1st and 2nd Edition... :-(

All in all, I found that although the number of existing Symbian third party applications in general is far from small, the proportion of titles that have been portes to S60 3rd Edition, more than 6 months after the availability of the first devices featuring that new version of the OS, is really disappointing. Don't get me wrong, there's a number of quality applications like Handy Weather which have been ported and make a perfect and efficient use of our devices, but this is a tiny number when compared to existing PalmOS or Windows Mobile applications. Sure, there's also a number of Java "applets" out there that are compatible with, say, my E61, but they never make use of features like the full Qwerty keyboard or the horizontal (landscape) screen layout, and their ergonomy fits a normal phone better than a smartphone.

So here I am, stuck with my data stored on my laptop but unreachable on my Smartphone, just because there's no decent Memopad or Notes application...

Come on Nokia, is it really that much difficult to include a decent Notes application in the ROM?