Mobile Ministry Magazine: Review: YourCall

Seeing mobile technology through the lens of Scripture

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Saturday, October 07, 2006

Review: YourCall

I was excited to see another product from Iambic Software. They've hit many homeruns in the past for PalmOS users, in particular, the Agendus package. I got an email from them announcing YourCall, an interactive piece of software that activates itself immediately upon disconnecting a phone call.

I downloaded the trial version about a week ago and have been using it. Here are my impressions:

The graphics of the program are excellent. Each activity, such as "Add caller to Calendar" is coupled with an icon. However, these icons would be easier to interpret if they had a small popup underneath them or small description. As it is, you have to immediately memorize what icon does what. They're not that self-explanatory. (Although they look good!)
I've had some problems in particular with Add to Calendar. My first round with this resulted in a frozen Treo 650, although while I was shedding my silicone phone cover to hit the reset button, it finally opened the calendar. A little buggy there. I could have accomplished that task faster manually.

I also am not particularly impressed with the popup window that happens after every phone call. You can train it not to do this, but you must train individually with every call that you make that has not been trained before.

I loved the options that this program presents you. It certainly does help one's productivity. I think that as the bugs are worked out, it will be an excellent complement to most folks' personal productivity. Though I didn't like the constant reminder from untrained phone numbers, there were times that the reminder helped me remember to add an appointment to my calendar after getting off the phone with that person.

There is a lot of promise for YourCall. Download the demo yourself and try it out.

2 Comments:

At Saturday, October 07, 2006 2:16:00 PM, Antoine said...: Jeff; nice review. I too have been using YourCall and its been really helpful on the calls of the people that I know, but for some reason are not coming up within my caller ID.

I think a great improvement would be to enable YourCall if you miss a call (send a SMS, add a reminder to call back, plus the other features that are there). For me, YourCall has made it into a necessary program on my Treo; now if I can only get off the phone some and talk to people :)
At Saturday, October 07, 2006 4:45:00 PM, Jeff Noble said...: Another thing I would add is that I have been using SharkMessage (http://www.ludustech.com/sharkmsg/)
which is free.

It enables you to send an immediate SMS to a caller if you choose to "Ignore." Unfortunately, YourCall seems to disable SharkMessage...

YourCall either needs to implement this feature or not disable SharkMessage.