The Dark Furie

If there's one thing that a good smartphone must be able to do, it's personal information management (PIM for short). One of the very first definitions of a smartphone, and the one that still holds today, is that a smartphone must have a suite of applications (we called them features in the olden days, before smoking cigars and talking about women wanting the vote) that allow a businessman (man whore in my case) to keep all of their contacts' details (friends and girlfriends) safe as well as manage appointments (dates). A smartphone had to be able to handle all that, being part secretary (wingman), part roladex and part filofax (look it up on Wikipedia, kids). This functionality is equally important in the modern smartphone, more so in our increasingly busy (settled down and engaged) lives, so let's see how Android measures up in part 2 of My Android Experience.

As you can see over on the right, the contact creation form is quite comprehensive and allows you to fill in quite a few details about your contacts, even allowing birthdays and anniversaries to be added to the calendar if you desire. The integration with other applications is where the Android contacts manager really shines though. Download a Twitter, Facebook or other application and the option to sync your contacts from that site will show up. Doing so adds them to your contact list and these will combine with your regular contacts or, if they have different names online, they can be manually merged. As a result of this the contacts application becomes a dream to use for social media enthusiasts, potentially keeping their contact history across a wide range of sites as well as e-mail and, calls and text messages. For the rest of us it's a bog standard phonebook with the helpful addition of having all contact history kept in the contact details of each person (did I mail the boss some excuse so I could stay up late and watch the wrestling or not?) as well as one touch access to the dialer and the option to sync to the web or export as a vcard - a file containing all of your contact details (including images) as plain text - to the SD card.

I'd flirted with using Google Calendar to handle my agenda before but, being completely mobile oriented and having no ability to add to it while offline, I soon gave it up as an unwieldy option. Expecting Android to be built around Google services I set up all of my data on Google Calendar and took advantage of the extra abilities this afforded me.

• Multiple Calendars
  I use my calendar for a lot of different things. Sometimes I mark appointments on there, other times it is used to keep track of birthdays or other events. By using multiple calendars for different event types I am able to keep all the functionality I'd previously had while making things a lot simpler to manage. The best example of this is my Rainy Day Post calendar which contains weird and interesting holidays from around the world, which I can use to write something up if I haven't posted for a while. Previously that took up the majority of my calendar but now I can choose to hide that completely or focus solely on that if I wish. The addition of this option increases how useful the calendar is to me over what I'd been using before.
• Imported Calendars
  While this probably isn't such a big deal to most people, importing calendars can be a lifesaver to those in professional fields, allowing them to plan around events and trade shows. Personally I use it for a much more personal reason. I'm a gamer you see, and I've found a calendar that is linked to the game release dates provided by the UK Amazon site. Now I can keep up with what has had a last minute delay without needing to go on the web and look around. It provides me with the information I want in an easy to see format with minimal effort from me.
• Shared Calendars
  Now this is the function that came in most handy for me. A little before I upgraded, my fiance also got an Android phone. As we live together we've found it easier to share the responsibility of setting up the calendar, each starting a new calendar with the idea of sharing it between us by inviting the other to the calendar. Now we can both see when our money comes in or when bills are due in advance and both have the same information. Likewise we have a shared calendar listing birthdays of people we care for, saving us the work of setting it up twice. The best part of this is the appointments calendar which we can both edit as well as see. With this we're able to make appointments that both of us are aware of from one device.

I can't speak for all Android devices, but the ones I've tried rely on this web layer to take care of complex things like that, with no option to do any of it from the phone itself. Without the online layer you have a single calendar called phone and must use that for everything, the same as the stock Symbian experience. Still, the web layer integrates well with the system and you're given the opportunity to add events to any of your calendars with a drop-down menu in the appointment creation form so all but the most business-oriented users shouldn't need more than the stock calendar.

So far I've been telling you about the contacts and calendar, the basis of PIM functionality in smartphones since the early days when they were all enterprise oriented. The thing is, a lot has changed over the years and smartphones have been finding their way into the hands of regular people for a while now. Most of those people couldn't care less about multiple e-mail entries or the ability to hide calendars for easier viewing, so personal information takes on a whole new meaning. As such I'm going to discuss a few third party applications that help me manage other information, and how that impacts my daily routine.

The first of these is Evernote, an app built for one purpose - taking notes. This is more than just a virtual Post It though. Evernote integrates with the phones features allowing you to add photos to your notes, voice recordings and any file on your phone. These are spread throughout user created notebooks and pushed to the web for online storage and access from any number of devices. As with most high quality smartphone apps, it was originally invented for professionals to use yet is useful in everyday life too. I've been using this to take quick notes of post ideas, as well as more generic reminders. One example is given in the picture over on the right. My fiance has been wanting to try the Subway Chicken Temptation for a while now but keeps forgetting to ask for it. I made a quick note then added an image of the sandwich along with the salad and sauce suggestions from the Subway website, mostly because the screenshot would have been quite boring otherwise. Evernote is one of those applications that quickly becomes indispensable in your day to day life, replacing pen and paper pretty easily. For those that just want basic text functionality there are a number of smaller applications available on the market but I chose this as I like to have the freedom to choose how I'll be recording things in the future. The app also has a useful home screen widget that allows quick access to your notebooks as well as one touch access to start making any kind of note, making it even easier to use. Who needs paper with this around?

Along the same lines as Evernote is Out Of Milk, a shopping list app. Again this is something people traditionally use paper for and again it's helpful in everyday life. There are dozens of shopping list apps on the market, and the choice between them is mostly down to personal taste, but I chose this for its simple interface. I may change it to another one later on as you really need to use these things for long enough to build up a decent database of items you regularly shop for before settling on one and I'm too lazy to enter them all from receipts beforehand. For those who aren't sure what benefit an application can make to theie shopping, just give it a try and you'll be pleasantly surprised, once you're past the setup stage. You can assign items to shops, keep track of your pantry to help you keep track of what you need, and build lists quickly and easily from barcodes alone if you need to, adding new items to the database in seconds. Then you just head out and tap things as you pick them up to mark them off the list. After a few shopping trips using this you'll have built up a database of things that make it much easier to use and soon be spitting on anyone that uses pen and paper lists just for the fun of it. Just me eh?

Moving swiftly onwards we find the Seinfeld Calendar, an app designed to help you break bad habits and build better ones. The idea is simple - you type in a good habit you want to form or a thing to do instead of a bad habit (not buying cigarettes while out on the town for example) and then reward yourself when you do that. You tap the date on the calendar and it adds a blue mark when you've completed one of your goals. Over time this mark will become a blue line, marking your progress and conditioning you to build the habit you're trying to form. The app nicely marks your longest streak so far, giving you a score to beat next time if you have a weak moment. Despite being based on a Seinfeld comedy routine (hence the name) this little app is based on quite sound psychology, the same that compels us to beat our high scores in videogames in fact, and the app helpfully keeps a record of our longest streak so we can beat it if we have a weak moment. This is a very useful tool for those of us who're trying to be better in some way although the app regularly force closes for me when it's not in use.

And that's the end of my look at PIM functionality on Android devices. As you can tell, I don't use those features as much as some people, but I do find them quite useful. The experience is undeniably better than I've been used to on Symbian, but only with the aid of third party applications and the use of a desktop PC. Without those the experience seems to be a little bit weaker out of the box.

Next time on My Android Experience I'll be looking at media creation and consumption, two things that are usually at opposite ends of the smartphone market.