The TamsShop contains a plethora of products related to this review. use the discount PHATISCOOL to get discounts on the following PhatWare products:
PhatNotes for PPC
PhatNotes PPC for Outlook (cheaper)
PhatPad for PPC
PhatNotes for WMS
PhatNotes WMS for Outlook
From day one, handheld computers were intended to store textual data : the very first handhelds actually were clamshell devices like Atari’s now-famous Portfolio. Thus, a plethora of text processing apps was created – while some of them just concentrated on editing, other applications also deployed their own storage formats. PhatWare’s PhatNotes is of the second variety…but can it stack up?
After starting the program for the first time, a plethora of Windows pops up. The window on the left shows the available container files, the window at the top contains the notes and the window at the bottom contains a preview. While this layout may work well on VGA screens, my rx4240’s QVGA screen can’t really handle it:
Notes can be formatted:
Voice samples can be attached too notes with relative ease. Users of PhatPad can even embed hand-written doodles…unfortunately, there’s no way to do that without PhatPad (which costs an additional 40$ – a pricing policy I personally consider outrageous):
Alarms can be assigned to notes, too:
Notes can be “colorized” in a fashion similar to Microsoft’s Outlook – this makes finding individual notes easier:
A context analyzer tool detects numbers and email addresses automatically:
A plug-in for the Today screen allows you to access recently-edited notes quickly:
Unfortunately, the program does not allow you to export all notes to industry-standard formats like txt or doc. However, individual notes can be exported to txt and rtf when opened:
Screen rotation works very well:
This review looked at version 5.3 of PhatNotes on a hp ipaq rx4240 running Windows Mobile 5.0. The program needs 1434KB of memory and works well from an external memory card!
In the end, PhatNotes is a well-programmed application that unfortunately adheres to a concept will be swept away by the sands of time. As storage cards become bigger and bigger, the overhead of storing individual text files becomes negligible (and offers higher security in case of data corruption). Leaving the issues outlined above aside, the program offers everything needed to manage rich-text notes – if you can live with the idea of database files, give this (very expensive – 40$) app a spin!
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