Where is tasks and notes on the iPhone?

I love the iPhone - grudgingly of course as it is an Apple product - it really has moved the mobile phone forward and everyone else has been left scrambling to catch up. Both Microsoft and Nokia are seriously struggling. But there are still major gaps.

One of the toughest things for Apple, is that it is trying to target two very different markets: business and consumer. It has had the consumer aspect tied up with its interface, music and phone capabilities (though it needs a better camera). On the business side, the simple support for Microsoft Exchange has helped it to quickly penetrate the business user. The number of iPhones in our office has rocketed and is now the most popular phone in the office - beating Microsoft phones.

But there is a downside - it syncs Email/Calendar/Contacts but does not sync Tasks and Notes (unlike mobile phones which use Windows Mobile).

There are some 3rd party solutions out there:

KeyTasks - Good interface but it does not seem to sync properly and there is no category support.

TaskData - It does not have a great interface and again no category support.

Surprisingly there is no Exchange Notes sync app that I am aware of. There is however a great app out there that provides this funcitonality (without the Exchange Sync). It is called Evernote. It allows you to type out notes, record voice clips, capture photos and even has some basic to do functionality. The only thing it really needs is Exchange sync support - and possibly the ability to record video clips but I guess we are waiting for Apple to support that first.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

I wrote over on afullerview the other day about how, a year ago, it was still much easier to just pick up the Yellow Pages and find local services.. despite the feeling that the paper version was very much an out of date medium.

Today I am in need of someone local to figure out what is wrong with my dishwasher.

Here are some real world results (searching for dishwasher repair london or if possible dishwasher repair my postcode. Lets take a look at how it went and see whether it was any better than last year.

Google:

• For the London search, it did a pretty good job - displayed a separate box of local results as well as some London-wide companies.
• For the postcode search, weirdly it displayed furniture shops first but lower down it listed a bunch of possible repair businesses nearby - but mostly for boilers.. changing the search slightly (”dishwasher repairs placed in speech marks”) restricted the results to 2 but nothing nearby.
• Using Google Maps provided the same localised results from the post code search.

Yahoo:

• For the London search, Yahoo also did a pretty good job - some possibilities though not a local enough search to provide anything nearby
• For the post code search - nothing
• Yahoo Maps - I could not get it to find anything.

Live.com:

• For the London search, it found some London/nationwide companies but nothing truly local, and not as relevant as Google’s or Yahoo’s.
• For the postcode seach it found nothing.
• Using Live Maps, with the postcode it found one possibility the other side of Essex (that’s quite far outside London!)

Yell.com

• Looks like a quick win. It found a whole bunch of suppliers. On closer look though, they are all the same company (they all link to the same website!). What happened to all the suppliers that are listed in the Yellow Pages (paper version)?

Conclusion
Well the major search engines are starting to catch up with the dedicated local search engines. Yell.com is theoretically still one of the best places to start but it failed miserably here. I expected Google to do better, but with most of the info entered into its local search results being a manual process done by the businesses themselves we are really waiting for the local businesses to catchup. Yahoo and Live was a complete waste of time.

Yell has the advantage of its age old paper version which contains a huge number of businesses but it really doesnt feel like they are taking advantage of it online.

In the long term though, Google was able to recognise that the search results I required needed local businesses in the results and not just companies with websites. Once they get more information about these businesses into their servers, more and more people will surely just search from Google?

With the addition of mobile search, location is also going to become an important factor. Guess who is the default provider on my iPhone.. yup Google. I did a quick search and unsurprisingly it gave me the same results as the desktop version. It is not perfect by any means though.

There is still a long way to go to get local search right.

By the way, I eventually found someone using Google website search, as I cannot find my copy of Yellow Pages - I think I recycled it .

I was in Atlanta last week and one of the single most annoying things was that the meetings in my calendar stuck with the UK time zone - so my 2pm meetings shifted out to 7pm (as the UK is 5 hours ahead of Atlanta).

I found the culprit in Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then scrolling down to the item Time Zone Support under Calendar. When switched on (mine was by default) this basically made your calendar show event dates and times according to the time zone selected for the calendar. I want my times to shift according to the time zone I am in so switching this item off produces that effect.

Happy days

Given its GPS functionality and superior mapping software, the lack of turn by turn GPS applications on the iPhone was a glaring omission. Especially as Windows Mobiles have had this functionality for years now.

Well it looks like that will quickly be rectified with the release of version 2.1 of the iPhone. This version will allow developers to do exactly that - what is the betting developers at TomTom and Garmin are busy downloading the latest developer’s version right now?

As per my previous post, my posts are out of whack as I am behind on them. To summarise one of them.. I got an iPhone and it is the best convergence device I have ever had. It really does replace my mp3 player,PDA and phone.

One of the major reasons for buying the iPhone was its ability to push my work email out to me immediately (using our Microsoft Exchange servers). It works great (though it does not sync my Outlook tasks for some reason?!). One of the issues I had when I used this push email functionality on my Windows Mobile phone was how it worked with my personal email/calendar/contacts. I could use Windows Live’s services but it is slow, clunky and therefore impossible to really use productively. So I had to make do combining my work and personal information and using the mobile browser for email.

On the iPhone, Apple have released MobileMe to provide a solution to this. It looks like an interesting solution which allows me to maintain a separate personal and work contact list and have upto date email/contacts/calendars on the move for my personal stuff. Despite the marketing speak it is not push ala Microsoft Exchange but pulling contacts and the calendar every minute so it is so near instantaneous - not that that really matters to most people (there are mutterings about email being pull as well but I can’t confirm that - anyone know what the reality is on this?). Anyhow, the real problem for me is that it requires me to use a mobileme email account (someone@me.com). I use my own personal domain for emails running on Google’s Apps so switching accounts really isn’t an option. Maybe one day they will offer a similar service to Google. Not sure it would be a priority for them.

There is push email on Yahoo but again similar to MobileMe, I have to use their email addresses and the personal contact list merges with your work one. I’m not sure if thats better or worse than having it separate. I suppose the most important thing is that it does not sync back to my work computer. There does not seem to be any sort of calendar sync.

So as I am already using Google, the obvious solution would be Gmail push on the iPhone. Google released push email on Helio (a US mobile carrier) a while back but there is currently nothing for the iPhone, so right now I am stuck either syncing via IMAP or using my mobile browser. Of course that also means no personal contacts list integrated with the phone or a calendar. It looks like there is possible a timeline to this happening though it isn’t till September at least. I wonder though if it will allow a separate personal contact list or will Apple keep that functionality to itself.