Everything Motorola Q

Review: PowerTasks

Power Tasks by Develper One is a third party application that offers significant improvements over the Tasks application that ships with your Motorola Q.

Powering Your Tasks

When using the Tasks application that ships with the Moto Q, you have limited options. It's a very basic application that allows you to do the following:

• Create new tasks
• Sort by Status, Priority, Subject, Start/Due Dates
• Send via Bluetooth or Beam
• Sort by existing categories

The program lacks several functions that are critical to managing your tasks. The limitations of the Tasks program became more glaring after I installed Power Tasks. Luckily, Power Tasks takes up the slack left by Tasks.

When creating a new task, Power Tasks allows you to set a variety of options.

• Date(s): Your task can cover a range of dates. When you click on the date using the center of the 5-way navigator, a pop-up calendar appears making it easy to select start/completion dates that are far off. This allows you plan your tasks ahead of time with ease.



• Alarms: You can set an alarm to remind you of the upcoming task. The alarm can be set for any time and date. Let's say you have an important task coming up on 7/25/2006, you can set an alarm for 5pm on the previous day.
• Repeating Tasks: This is a great option if you have tasks that occur weekly, bi-weekly and so on. I would have liked to have seen an option for daily repeating tasks. You can also set an end date for the reoccuring task.
• Priorities: This enables you to set Low, Default and High.
• Categories: You can create new categories or use categories imported that are currently associated with your desktop Mac or PC.
• Notes: This allows you to add a note associate with a task.

Power Task also allows you to edit an existing task, a feature that is suprisingly missing from the packaged Tasks program. When comparing the two columns, it just accentuates the extended capabilities of Power Tasks over Tasks. In addition to the extended capabilities with creating tasks, Power Tasks also allows you to email a task.



Working Your Tasks

I found some of the more intuitive features of Power Tasks to be the Insert feature. For example, if your task involves calling a contact, you can choose the Insert Contact feature. The Moto Q will prompt you to select a number. Once you've completed the task entry, you'll have an option to call that number from within Power Tasks. There is also a very useful tool called My Text. If find yourself typing the same text string, you can create a customized Text Entry in My Text. Power Tasks also comes with a pre-set group including popular entries:

• Call
• Meet With
• Schedule

There are 9 pre-filled My Text fields and you can customize up to 20 My Text entries. I found this to be a useful feature, considering my tasks often revolve around specific website tasks such as "Finish Review" and this allows me to create a custom text entries specific to my industry. It also allows you to set priority of your My Text moving them up and down on the list.



Customize Your View

The ability to customize your tasks does not end with creating tasks with Power Tasks. In addition to sending via Bluetooth, Power Tasks also enables you to send via email. You can customize the view of your tasks and some will find this helpful for quickly viewing your most pressing tasks. You can edit a variety of colors including:

• Background
• Tasks
• Overdue Tasks
• Future Tasks
• Undated Tasks
• Completed Tasks
• Highlight Background
• Highlight Text
• Group Name Background
• Group Name Text
• Preview Text



Conclusion

If you're serious about managing your everyday tasks, then you have no choice but to look to third party developers. Power Tasks, by Developer One, is a significant upgrade over the Tasks application that ships with the Motorola Q. The task creation capabilities are a much needed addition to the Moto Q and I found the "Insert Contact" and "My Text" features to be very intuitive allowing me to customize the application to my needs. DeveloperOne has done a fine job in creating an application that addresses the needs of those looking for a more robust task manager.

Power Tasks retails for $14.95 and is available as a free trial.