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Before I get too far with this, I need to offer some kind of disclaimer and explain my relationship with Iambic. I am an Agendus fangirl. It’s really as simple as that. I am Agendus biased. I wrote several reviews about Agendus for Palm back in the day. Agendus was my number one go to app on my Centro and Treos before that. I used to spend hours hanging out on the Iambic forums giving users advice – whether they wanted it or not. I finally spent so much time there, that Adriano Chiaretta said “hey, why not join the Iambic Forums Team.” I was tickled pink. Then I discovered that active Iambic Forum Team members get a small monthly honoraria and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. After all, that was do what I was already doing, only now I could represent and pick up a few bucks? Woohoo!!

This does not mean I love all Iambic’s products. I dislike Agendus Mail. Seriously. But I know what works and what doesn’t, and I understand where the company is trying to go. The goal, as I see it, is simple: get the functions of Agendus for the Palm on all possible platforms. The goal is simple…it’s the implementation that’s not. You see, Palm’s version is 13 – it’s mature. Heck, it’s so mature that Palm Inc. has put the entire platform out of its misery! What many users fail to understand is that you can’t just take a mature app for platform A and put it through a transformer and have it come out the other end intact and ready to be run on platform B. You have to code everything from scratch.

That brings us around to Agendus for the iPhone, which is in its infancy. Think Action Names – which is what Agendus was before it went through puberty (if you will), and became Agendus. It was a contacts manager. Right now, Agendus for iPhone is pretty much a contacts manager. I could go through everything AGiP doesn’t have that AGP does. But as I’ve pointed out, no other version of Agendus on any platform has what AGP does – but they get closer and closer every day.

Do I wish Iambic had waited until it had more functionality? Of course. Do I understand why they put it out before it did? Absolutely. Do I agree with the $8.00 price tag? No. Then again…they aren’t going to be able to charge for every update on the iPhone like they do on every other platform. I say “get it while it’s hot,” because if Apple ever relaxes some of its app restrictions, you could see the same $25 price tag for many apps, not just Agendus.

For the sake of argument, I’m going to do my famous conclusion jumping move and assume you know how closed the iPhone API is, and that you understand how difficult it is to get an app through the app store. If you don’t know and understand these things, stop for just a moment and ask yourself why 98 of every 100 apps for iPhone are simple games or fart apps, and that should give you your answer.

So what is it that Agendus does on your iPhone? Right now – not a whole lot. That’s the honest truth. It gives you some different contacts views from what you can get in the default iPhone contacts.

Agendus gives you the option of showing your contacts First Name / Last Name, Last Name / First Name, Last Name / First Name / Company, and a few other variations. I pretty much stick to the traditional Last/First.

Better still is the expanded contacts view that gives you the contact photo along with their numbers and email addresses. 

From the expanded view you can tap the contact’s email to take you to the email app and right into a new email, or tap the phone number for the option of dialing or sending an SMS.

Regardless of the look or what you can do, this is still the Apple iPhone database, and anything you do to your contacts from within Agendus will be reflected in the default contacts app and anywhere you currently sync your pim data. So far the only flaw I’ve found is that AGiP not only doesn’t reflect any custom ringtone for a contact, it doesn’t give you the option of changing it to anything beyond the standard iPhone ringtones (which we all know are BLAH).

The home screen leaves much to be desired. Since there is currently no calendar integration, it can’t tell you much about your day. It offers a few little tidbits like Quote of the Day, This Day in History, the Weather Forecast, and Tasks – providing you’ve set those tasks in Agendus. I like the weather. But I don’t really need to go into Agendus to see the weather, because I already have The Weather Channel and it goes into much greater detail. Unfortunately, Quotes and History Day were two features I never used back in the good old days of Palm.

Tasks look nice. They contain all the useful features you expect to find in a task manager…but they don’t sync to anything or show up in the calendar. Most of us want to see our tasks in our calendars.  I know it’s something to look forward to, but right now it’s a little on the disappointing side. Then again, I sync to Google which doesn’t sync tasks yet anyway. I’m hoping for the best here – I don’t care for any of the Tasks alternatives out there at the moment.

Notice the integration of contacts in tasks? Definitely a step in the right direction, but it’s not working quite right yet. I can’t seem to get a current contact into the task. There’s a nice little arrow that should bring you into your contacts from the task, but it doesn’t do anything on my iPhone. So I type out the contact name and am prompted to add the contact as new.

Because I love Agendus and have faith in Iambic, I will stick with it. I am the poster child for product loyalty. I have faith that with a few updates we will start seeing a product that is more recognizable to old (make that former) Agendus users, and one that will sync somewhere to make it more valuable to all of us.

Iambic’s developers are pretty good about taking customer suggestions, so my advice is to get it now while it’s still a work in progress, and join us in the forums with your product suggestions.

June 18th, 2009 | Tags: Agendus, calendar, contacts, Iambic, manager, Palm, pim, tasks, windows mobile | Category: Editorials, Reviews | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed