WapReview

Google's launched a mobile version of Google Calendar. The mobile url is google.com/calendar/m. It's elegantly simple both in ease of use and functionality. The default (and only view) is of one month starting with today. Prev and Next links jump a month back or forward. Of course the mobile and desktop web versions of Google Calendar are always in sync.

 

The Quick Add feature, which is also part of the desktop web  version of Calendar, is very slick. Google recognizes natural language phrases, like:

"Staff meeting next Monday at 13:00"
"Vacation 9/23 - 9/26" - creates a recurring event.
Or even "Dinner at Mom's on the first Tuesday of every month"

Pretty amazing. There's more on Quick Add here.

Google Calendar optimized for advanced mobile browsers. Looks and works more like a native calendar app with separate day and month views. Served by default to the iPhone, bada, WebOS and Android browsers. Minor rendering issues but usable by entering the URL in Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini.  

Google now has a mobile web version of their Beta Tasks web application.

On the full web, Google Tasks is integrated into Gmail. The mobile version is a stand alone page.  To view it visit gmail.com/tasks (in some regions including Germany it may be necessary to use googlemail.com/tasks.)

There are two versions of mobile tasks. iPhones and Android devices get an enhanced one that lets you add, edit, and delete tasks and task lists, as well as mark tasks as completed. Lesser phones see a stripped down Task interface  which is missing the ability to edit or delete tasks although you can view your existing tasks, add new tasks, and mark tasks as completed.

It's too bad that the enhanced version is limited to iPhones and Android. I suspect that other advanced Ajax capable  mobile browsers like S60WebKit and Opera Mobile and maybe even Opera Mini could handle the iPhone version but Google is redirecting those browsers to the basic version.

This is cool! Coolendar is a deceptively simple looking cloud based calendar and to-do list that's is very easy and intitive to use. You add entries (Coolendar calls them "Plans") by typing into a single free form field in Coolendar's iPhone or Android native apps or their nWebapp

Coolendar's natural language query processor looks for date or time related cues in entries like "Move the car tomorrow" or "Friday 9AM planning meeting" and creates calendar entries for them. Entries without dates or times are treated as to-do's.

You can flag entries as Important and mark them as Done. A filter drop down lets you view only entries for Today, Tommorow, This Week or just ones flagged as Important or Done.

Coolendar is well connected. It uses your Google account for authentication and login, but the Coolendar Calendar is independent and not stored in Google Calendar by default. If you wish you can sync Coolendar with Google Calendar Apple ICal or Microsoft Outlook. You can also create Plans using Gmail or Google Chat by sending a specially formatted email or IM and Coolend and can notify you of impeding events by email or Google Talk. Coolendar's email notifications contain handy libnks that let you mark the plan as complete and/or delete it or reschedule it.

Although it's not mentioned on Coolendar's site, the web app is mobile aware, the layout and logic adapts to work perfectly in the Android, Symbian and Opera Mobile browsers. It's functional, if a bit clunky (too large font, lots of server round trips) in Opera Mini. I suspect it will work in just about any browser with at least minimal JavaScript support.

I've just discovered Evernote and I think I'll be using this service a lot. It combines online notes, bookmarking, character recognition and a filling system to create a very efficient way to capture and organize your thoughts, observations and all those things you need to remember. There are a couple of versions of Evernote, I'm using the 3.0 beta which is Web (and mobile web) based, although it also has a optional desktop component. I haven't tried the older desktop-only 2.2 version. The 3.0 beta is currently "closed" but that just means who have to request a invitation which can take a few days. The invites seem to be all over the web lately, in fact I have 20 to give out. Leave a comment if you want one.

The way Evernote works is that you send "notes" to Evernote. The notes can be Web pages; snippets of text from a page, email or document; images (especially those containing text) or PDF's. To send notes to Evernote you can use a bookmarklet, email, MMS or Evernote's Mac OS, Windows Mobile, XP or Vista clients. Java ME and iPhone clients are under development. The Windows and Mac desktop applications are complete standalone note management systems that can obtionally synchronize with Evernote on the Web.

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A basic but highly usable note taking mobile web app. PicoNote looks like a good replacement for the discontinued Google Notebook.

The plain text notes can be public or private and are created and viewed using the piconote.com full web site, the mobile site or a Windows only PC application. The desktop version stores notes locally for offline access and synchronizes your notes with the PicoNote cloud for anywhere access and backup. There's also Twitter integration, you can create a note in Twitter by sending a Direct Message to piconote.

The required registration is instant and only requires you to pick a name and password, nothing else is needed not even an email address. Unfortunately you can only register on the full site. I'd really like to see PicoNote enable mobile registration to make it a self contained mobile app.

Jotminder is a free cloud-based personal online wiki notepad. Store your notes, pictures, files and links in the cloud. Access Jotminder from the cloud using desktop or mobile - smartphone, tablet, iphone, ipad, etc. Notes are secure and can be private or public. Via: Mobile Mammoth

Yodlee Money Center is a web based personal finance application. The service, which is free for personal use, is actually an "account aggregator" meaning it lets you view and manage multiple bank and brokerage, credit card, loan and PayPal accounts within a single application. Yodlee can import transactions from hundreds of institutions and when your transactions it automatically assigns each to a category like income, expenses, entertainment, utilities. You can override these categories and setup your own.

Yodlee has Bill Pay too. You can pay bills online from any of your linked credit card accounts and Yodlee can also act as a front end to many bank's bill payment systems.

Budgeting is another Yodlee feature. You set of goals for certain classes of expenditures like entertainment and Yodlee will alert you when get near or exceed your goal. There are budget reports and graphs to help you visualize where all that money went.

Yodlee is the most powerful and feature rich free online money management system I've seen yet. It's not limited to just financial services either. Yodlee can also import and display your gMail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, although it just shows a read only view of the subjects of recent mails. To read the full email and reply Yodlee offers a link that automatically logs you into the webmail providers site.

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Buxfer Buxfer has been in the news lately as one of the first two sites to use Google Gears for Mobile. The other Gears Mobile powered site, online office suite Zoho, only works with Windows Mobile devices. Buxfer is a personal finance and payment service and it supports most phones with a a mobile site and an SMS interface. Of course, only WinMo phones get the advantage of the Buxfer's new offline mode because Google hasn't released Gears Mobile for other platforms yet.

The full web version of Buxfer, which started out a simple service for tracking debts between friends and housemates, has grown into a full featured personal finance application supporting multiple accounts, import from Quicken, MS Money or .csv files, flexible search functions, analytics with graphing and budget management. You can also make payments from within Buxfer using Amazon's new PayPal like Amazon Payments service.

Buxfer's mobile web site is more limited than the full version but still useful. It lets you view account balances and transaction history, post an expense or payment transaction and check if your spending is within your budget. Buxfer can even send an SMS alert when you go over budget. You can sign up for the service on the phone too, something I think every mobile web service should allow.

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Mobile interface to the popular 30boxes.com online calendar application. View and edit your 30boxes calendar and to-do list from your phone. You have to sign up on the 30boxes.net PC site. Nice site but their are a couple of issues. Your login is your email address - hard to type on a phone, an alpha login ID is more mobile friendly. Logging into the mobile site with Opera Mini fails with "Too many redirects".

An online time tracking tool for professionals who want to keep track of the hours they work on various projects. The mobile edition on 88 Miles is limited to clocking in and out of projects. A free account lets you track up to 40 hours per month with unlimited tracking starting at $5/month. If you're stuck with an old phone or a spendy data plan there's even a wml version.

MyHours is an web based time tracking service were you can track your own or employees times and costs against multiple projects. MyHours is currently in beta and all services are free. There are plans to eventually charge of premium accounts but the site claims that basic personal time tracking will always be free.The mobile version lets you open and close projects and review, edit and delete your entries.

TickedList looks to be a rather powerful free online organizer with mobile and PC web front ends.TickedList has four main modules; ToDo list, memos, expense tracker and shopping list. A "Today" screen shows a summary of items due in the next week.  There's even a "Groups" feature that lets you manage shared tasks.

HTML5 checklist webapp works offline using the local storage API.  Works with Mobile Safari, Android 2.1, N900 MicroB and Mobile Firefox and Palm WebOS.

Mobile edition of the popular "Web 2.0" online to-do list, scheduler/calendar. No mobile registration, register on your PC at www.rememberthemilk.com/signup/

Another online task manager. It's often compared with RememberTheMilk.com (RTM). Both have mobile versions, an essential feature for ToDo applications in my opinion. Strangely though, neither RTM nor Todoist let you signup to use the service from the mobile web site.

Gubb's an online list application that can be used for to-do lists, shopping lists, home inventory or any thing else you want to store in a list with or without do dates. You have to sign up on Gubb's PC site first but other than that the mobile version duplicates all the functionality of the PC one - adding deleting and modifying lists and items.

Free online and mobile shopping list. No registration required to use.  Knotler's PC site at www.knotler.com recognizes the iPhone (only) to deliver a nice mobile formatted html version.  Other mobiles are stuck with the WML version at wap.knoller.com.