Todo is great for me, I never have anything to do being that it won't launch. (I reflashed and tried that first, installing the libs in order... nothing. I gave up)

I'm going to review this tomorrow. From the initial inspection, it looks like it's going to be perfect and lovely until someone comes up with one that doesn't cost anything to sync... then it'll tank.

After a brief -- and I mean brief -- comparison, I think that GPE has more features than Calendar app (day view, week view, month view), whereas the deja app does not. However, I noticed a major difference between the apps with respect to memory and cpu usage. The deja app seemed to use less memory and cpu. I will update with more info as I use the apps.

@ desktop

Contrary to my experience. It launches. But I haven't put anything in it, not even manually, yet. Will try and report back. See "blog" later today.

Will it install and run on the MMC card?

Tony

I installed the PIM and started to play with it. I noticed a few things that were not correct like no vCard import and missing views in the calendar. On their website they have an email of support@companionlink.com and if you put in the subject line "Suggestion 770" it actually will be read!

I sent an email and within about two hours I had an actual personalized reply that responded to all of my suggestions individually. That is such a HUGE improvement over the automated replies. Just so you know he stated that vCards will be added to the list and that the calendar views will be added by mid Febuary. The only bummer is no Mac support but who knows in the future.

I love a company that responds like that and will continue to support this application as long as they keep up the good work and improve it.

What about the rest of the applications, how are they working? Also, how about installing on the MMC card, can you?

Tony

I've used both the GPE suite and the DejaPIM "suite". I put "suite" in quotes in the latter because it is not really a suite so much as a single application.

GPE's PIM comes in three programs - GPE-Calendar, GPE-Todo, and GPE-Contacts.

GPE-Contacts works almost stably, but it has trouble importing vCards unless they are of a particular format (unrecognized fields have to be stripped out), and I can't seem to get categories to work at all. It has a decent organization, including real-time substring searching, but it gets slow as the number of contacts approaches hundreds.

GPE-Todo works pretty fine - actually, it worked best of all of the GPE apps. It never crashed, categories worked (I think), and there were plenty of fields to fill out. Alarms are available for selection in the UI, but they don't actually work.

GPE-Calendar is a wreck. From what I can tell, they're still trying to get the bugs ironed out. Like the other GPE apps, there are plenty of fields to use when describing an appointment, except that there is no "Location" field, which is disappointing (no pun intended). And whatever you do, don't try to set an alarm, because every time I tried, it crashed the program and corrupted the GPE-Calendar database to the point of having to remove the Calendar database entirely and start all over. And trying to export appointments to vCard works fine, but it fails when trying to import the same file, so backing up your appointments that way is a no-go. You can still backup the ~/.gpe/calendar file, though, so backup in that sense is possible. Overall, I was very disappointed in GPE-Calendar's current state, and I hope they get the bugs worked out quickly, because I really want to use the GPE suite, especially since it's open source.

That said, I am now testing out DejaPIM, which I've discovered is very different.

First of all, it's one application, which is nice if you plan on using more than one of the sub-apps (Contacts, Calendar, Todo, and Notes). Whereas in GPE, each application has its own icon in the window list, in Deja, one icon controls them all, which is good in that you can leave the application open and not clutter your window list (or hog your memory).

Secondly, DejaPIM feels a lot more Nokia 770-ish - for example, the date and time selection widgets are the same as the ones you use in the Date/Time control panel (for better or for worse...). This is likely because the application is designed explicity for the Nokia's Hildon UI, unlike GPE.

Deja does use less memory and is generally more responsive, but this is probably because there are fewer features. For example, you can't specify a recurring appointment like you can in GPE-Calendar, and the "summary" pages for the sub-apps are very simplistic (e.g. no graphical representation of appointments, all contacts are simply displayed in a single list without search capability, although categories work fine across the entire application).

You can specify Alarms, but they don't actually alarm on the Nokia 770 - I think they only set up alarms on your Outlook machine.

One major disappointment in Deja is the lack of importing/exporting. GPE's importing and exporting (when it worked) was very useful, but there is no such beast in Deja. You pretty much HAVE to use the Outlook synchronization if you want any form of import/export. You can backup the data files (they're in the ~/apps/deja folder, which can be symlinked or backed up to an MMC at your discretion).

On that note, I don't even use Outlook, so I don't plan on ever paying for the synchronization. I just want a PIM that is useful on my Nokia 770, so that I can replace my Palm-based Clie (which I don't synchronize with my desktop for any reason other than backup purposes).

In summary, GPE is more featureful, but at the cost of memory and bugs. Deja has fewer features, but is more stable. I'll be using Deja until GPE-Calendar and GPE-Contacts get their bugs ironed out, which I hope is quick, because I need my recurring appointments.

Well,
I tried Deja, and it has some problems.
Yes, it found my Outlook files on the internet, and syncronized.
By the way, I set it to be one-way, PC=>770 just to be safe.
What I really needed this for was to put my contact list onto the 770.
And it did so, but the list is kaflooey.
All my contacts are Business, but they listed in a haphazard order, only when listing All as the option. Business Only left nothing listed.
Now, could be the way I entered the contacts, but both my PC outlook and PocketPC Contacts listed them alphabetically.
Deja listed them weirdly, and there is no way to browse by first letter, etc, so you have to scroll through the full list to find them.
Not good.
And when I went to do anything else, the only way to switch between some menus was to hit the X close gadget, and the entire program closed.

Now, I'm happy I have all the contacts on my 770, but this program needs major work if I'm going to pay $10 per month.

Thanks for the awesome side-by-side, gnuite.
Can we ask Nokia to port the Nokia desktop suite AND the Nokia Wayfinder interfaces to the 770? Please? Please?