an Aangel on my shoulder

This may sound weird, but I have found my guardian angel. I always knew that she was out there somewhere. I knew that if I just kept looking, we would meet - and then my life would change forever.

Last week, I met her. Let me explain...

I love Outlook, and would feel quite lost now without its familiar frames gracing the screen of my Laptop. Software suites like Outlook, Lotus Notes or Mac's equivalent Entourage are powerful organisational tools with one tiny but painful flaw. You see, to make any desktop software organiser really work, you need to use it religiously. Every time you think of something you must do, or are told to do, you should be creating a task in your task list. Every appointment should be in your desktop diary, and every contact found in your contact lists. In practice however, this seems almost impossible for all but the most desk-bound of office workers.

Invariably, for people who use products like Outlook there are times when they would like to be able to put something into Outlook, but can't right there and then. I mean I'm walking from my car to a meeting, just on time, and I get a phone call. One of those conversations that finishes with something like "Alright Mike, thanks for that, I'll send that information to your office, and ill call you next Wednesday. Bye". Now, booting up the laptop or tapping at a PDA while walking along a busy street is just not practical - yet I can't run the risk of forgetting!

I've thought of many convoluted solutions to this problem, one being my mobile phone. Mobile phones these days can be seriously useful, well above and beyond the mere ability to call another person. Many phones these days have these built in diaries and reminder functions - a complete personal information manager in your shirt pocket. But getting any information into these on-board diaries is a challenge few people are willing to accept.

The user interface is the problem. In fact, this is the main problem that has plagued mobile makers ever since they started adding advanced features to their handsets. How do they create an easy way to for us, the users, to use the advanced functions on their phones? For example, take my late model (and pleasure to use) Nokia. It features a built in organiser with full diary and task pad. If I want to use the keypad to create an entry like 'meeting with john' for 1pm tomorrow, I will need to use something like 45 button presses (even more if you don't use predictive text!). No wonder then that almost no one uses the little diary they carry with them every day. It's just too hard.

But now I have my Aangel. Now, to remember anything I just dial Aangel, say what I want and hang up. Then, miraculously it seems, my phone beeps - and there on my screen is a new task, contact or appointment waiting to be saved to my mobile! What's better still is that when I next fire up the laptop, there is the same information waiting in my inbox, ready to be saved to Outlook with a click of the mouse.

Aangel saves me time and makes using the built in organiser on my phone both drop dead simple and incredibly useful. Instead of 45 button presses, try four. One when you press your speed dial to 808, one when you hang up and 2 to save what is sent back to you. Now I can just say what time and with who, and presto, Aangel sends out an appointment straight back out to my phone, which I can read and save in just 2 presses.

So, instead of just committing important promises to memory, I tell Aangel. One call to Aangel means I am reminded of that promise the next time I check my email. The same one call will even mean I can update this information in Outlook in a couple of clicks. It's like having someone to follow me around all day with my computer, ready to type in anything I yell at them, except I only pay them $10 a month to be there. Try and find a PA that cheap.

So you see I think I've found what I've been looking for. No more gadgets. No more software or temperamental widgets. Just the way it should be, simple, easy. Me, my phone and my Aangel.

articles