Natara DayNotez review

Keeping a personal journal can be rewarding and useful.

If you store it on your handheld, you get the benefit of easy searches. It only takes a few seconds to see what you were doing on a particular day, and you can quickly pull up a list of, say, all the cinema visits you've made in the past year. What's more, if you choose to keep your memoirs private, it's that much easier when the information is in electronic form.

It's possible to use the built-in Calendar application to store such notes, but most people don't want this historic data cluttering up the information they need on their day-to-day agenda. DayNotez is the perfect way to keep a detailed diary on your PDA. A longstanding favourite among Palm handheld users, it has now been ported to the Pocket PC operating system. You can enter unlimited text for each entry, and each one is time- and date-stamped automatically. When creating entries, text can be formatted using emphases such as bold, underline and italics, and you can also use paragraph alignment, bulleted lists, indents and a variety of font attributes. If you want to separate entries, perhaps with work and personal items in different categories, it's a simple matter to create as many as you wish and then select the desired category from a pop-up menu. Once the data is entered, a powerful filtering system makes it easy to show a list of all the entries containing a specific word or phrase, in chronological order with a time and date shown for each item. Filters can be given descriptive names and saved for use again later, which is a powerful feature.

No option is available to import or export DayNotez information directly on the handheld, other than via the standard clipboard, but there's an optional Windows desktop companion application that synchronises all the information via ActiveSync and provides full import and export to and from PC-based applications.

Aside from not being able to add sketches, photographs or other file attachments, which would be a useful feature, DayNotez provides all the tools you need to enter, view and manipulate your personal journal. If you want to keep your life story on your Pocket PC, look no further than DayNotez.