Pocket Informant from webIS is a personal information management app that lets you manage your calendar and contacts on mobile devices running iOS, Android, or BlackBerry OS.

Once upon a time the Windows Mobile app actually functioned as a complete replacement for Microsoft’s PIM apps by offering a contact manager as well. Now it looks like contact management is coming soon to the iOS app.

WebIS founder Alex Kac has posted a preview video showing Pocket Informant 2.0 on an iPhone. The biggest change is the new contact manager which lets you view contacts by name, or by category. You can also scroll through contacts by viewing large photos of each person in your address book (assuming you have photos associated with those people.

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Parking in Motion is a new app for iPhone simplifies the tedious task of finding a spot by allowing you to to find, reserve and pay for parking across the US, Canada and Europe. From its database of 16,000 locations (300+ US cities, 50+ canadian cities, and 200+ European cities), just name a city and the app instantly gathers ultra-useful parking information.

This free app’s specialty is its extensive knowledge of your city’s parking options. This includes parking facility types (Garage, Surface Lot, Valet), hours of operation, and comparisons of parking prices. You can reserve your spot before you arrive, such as airport parking locations, and instantly find parking near your destination.

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This just keeps getting better. Research in Motion caught a fair amount of flack for launching a tablet which doesn’t include native email, calendar, or contact apps. But the company said all you need to do is download an app called BlackBerry Bridge on your BlackBery smartphone and you can access versions of your phone’s personal information management apps in big screen glory on the PlayBook.

There’s just one problem: The BlackBerry Bridge app is now availabel for download, but it doesn’t work on AT&T’s network.

The app works with all other carriers, but because BlackBerry Bridge doesn’t just let you share your calendar, contacts, and other apps but also your internet connection, AT&T has blocked it — likely to prevent you from tethering your tablet without paying an extra monthly fee. Of course, free tethering is probably one of the biggest selling points for the PlayBook, but I wouldn’t be surprised if AT&T eventually adds support for the Bridge software only after the company figures out how to charge extra for it.

Fortunately the folks at CrackBerry have discovered a workaround which will let you run the software on AT&T BlackBerry phones.

Update: AT&T says the company is still testing the app which is why it’s not yet available for AT&T customers.

The folks behind the Pocket Informant calendar and task manager app for iOS are preparing to launch version 2.0. It will be available as a free upgrade for existing users.

The app has received a major graphic overhaul, and the developer has Read the rest of this entry »

Pocket Informant is, hands down, one of my favorite mobile apps. The folks at WebIS have versions of this calendar/task/contact organizer for Windows Mobile, iPhone, and BlackBerry devices. Noticeably absent? An Android version. But not for much longer.

WebIS CEO Alex Kac says that the company will start beta testing Pocket Informant for Android in about two weeks.

This will just be an early beta test for now. It won’t be widely available to the public. And it won’t have all of the final features yet. But it will let WebIS do some bug testing so that the company can officially launch the app in a few months. Right now Kac says he’s hoping to have something available for the public by September or sooner.

You can check out some more early screenshots of the Pocket Informant task manager for Android at the WebIS forums.

For years, one of the first applications I installed on any Windows Mobile PDA was Pocket Informant. This personal information management application offered far more features than you could get from the built in calendar, contact, and task applications. Pocket Informant makers WebIS have been offering a finger-friendly version of Pocket Informant for the iPhone and iPod Touch for a while, and I took it for a spin recently.

There are a few significant differences between the Windows Mobile and iPhone versions of Pocket Informant. The first and most noticeable is that Pocket Informant for the iPhone has been designed to be easy to use with your fingertip rather than a stylus. Instead of tapping and holding on tiny text, you can tap on a day in the calendar to bring up an Events view with larger text showing appointments coming up each day. Tap any appointment to see more details or edit it.

The second, and at least as important difference is that at $10, Pocket Informant for the iPhone is significantly cheaper than the $20 Windows Mobile version. There’s also a free version of Pocket Informant for the iPhone with a limited feature set.

This pricing makes sense since iPhone apps tend to be cheaper and $20 seems like a lot of money to pay for an iPhone app. There are also an awful lot of iPhone users out there, which could theoretically make it easier to make money by selling the software for less money.

The iPhone app doesn’t include a contact manager. But the calendar is at least as good as the version for Windows Mobile. One of my favorite aspects is that there’s a very usable week view. For some reason, most mobile calendars I’ve seen have decent day and month views. But when you switch to the week view, you see a bunch of lines letting you know when there are appointments instead of text telling you what those appointments are.

Pocket Informant divides the screen into 7 segments and lets you see what’s actually happening, today, tomorrow, and a week from today at a glance. I don’t know why this is such a revolutionary concept, but it’s almost worth paying $10 for this feature alone. But it’s the next one that gets me really excited.

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