August 1998 - HandHeld PC Magazine
By Dom Giangrasso

Odyssey Computing's Pocket On-Schedule Version 2.5 for Windows CE is a full featured contact and information manager. Think of it as the regular Win CE PIM applications on steroids: Your regular Contact List, To Do list, and Calendar with the relational powers of an industrial strength personal information system.

What sets Pocket On-Schedule (POS) apart from other PIMs is its ability to function with multiple versions of your databases. While it is fully compatible with Pocket Outlook and both reads and writes to its database, POS allows multiple views. The catch here is that only Odyssey's desktop On-Schedule application has the ability to synchronize these multiple views. If you just have the CE version you'll have to select one calendar, to do list, and contact list to synch via Win CE services.

The application was simple to set up from its CD ROM and, like many CE apps, requires your HPC to be connected via Win CE services prior to installation. The executable files take up between 600 and 800K of your HPC's memory, depending on your configuration. During the installation you are asked to select a target location which not only includes RAM but also flash card memory.

POS allows you to create numerous databases to support as many phone books, calendars and/or to-do lists as you need. This organizational power lets you create separate information for your business and personal life. A good example of this might be to establish different contact list for your various prosperous businesses while maintaining a separate list for the contacts in your personal life.

The capabilities on the phone book side of POS allow for three email addresses per contact, and ten phone numbers (there can't be enough room for phone numbers). Along with these is a variety of interesting features, like automatic call logging timers, linked to-do items, customizable labels, and a contact history. The history actually helps to record actions related to a given contact such as dialing, emailing, faxing, or scheduled appointments.

Of course, you really need to do all of these things from within Pocket On-Schedule and the application obliges with capabilities such as tone dialing, email links to Inbox and faxing capability. There is even a start and stop timer to let you time incoming phone calls. POS also has a versatile calendar of tricks. The calendar has all of the usual day, week, month, and year views but we were impressed with the monthly view with its windowed zoom in. While the regular Win CE monthly calendar view lets you tap on a day, you are whisked away to the day view to see details. In On-Schedule, you are given a small windowed view of the selected day's activities while maintaining your monthly view.

The to-do list is a standard affair with all of the usual functionality with the addition of the ability to link to a contact. A Journal view provides a way to view all of the related links within your PIM database including contact history and a representation of your activities. Global search, customizable views, and ad-hoc linking round out the capabilities of the package.

All in all, Pocket On-Schedule is a robust and versatile package for your HPC which extends and improves the range of your PIM capabilities. If you want the multiple phone books, calendars, and to-do lists you'll need to check out On-Schedule for Win 95/NT. If your desktop PIM is not Schedule Plus or Outlook you'll need to get a 3rd party package, such as Intellisync, to manage its connection to your PIM.