Treo 650 InfoMan(ia)

For the last few days, I have been travelling in Milan visiting friends.  Since this is the fashion capital of Italy (and some would argue the world) I’ve naturally indulged in just a little bit of shopping for everything from shirts and suits to shoes and socks – something which as a man I am generally less than amiable to.

However, because I am used to valuing goods in Dollars or Pounds and not Euros or Swiss Francs I found myself struggling to keep up with all the calculations (I did buy quite a bit of stuff…).  Luckily, one of my favourite new applications, InfoMan, contains a module with an excellent currency converter.

InfoMan’s ‘Currency’ module can convert between any one of 109 world currencies while receiving the most current exchange rates via wireless updates at the press of a button.  However, the really helpful feature of the Currency module is that I can select a portfolio of currencies (I chose US Dollar, Euro, British Pounds and Swiss Francs) and easily convert between any of these.  All I need to do is simply select the currency that I want to convert from (Euro for example) and enter the amount then all other currencies are automatically updated with the correct conversion for this amount.

However InfoMan’s Currency module is but one of 11 in total.  In its most recent update a new module called ‘Amazon’ was added.  As the name suggests, this latest module allows you to search Amazon.com’s entire product database which is great not only if you forgot the title of a book that you’d like to buy but also for comparison shopping, user reviews and even editorial reviews.  The only thing is that at the moment one cannot actually buy anything via this module and so it is for information purposes only.

On this particular trip, I had mentioned to my friends how great I thought the Bose Quiet Comfort headsets for travelling and so when we happened to walk by the local Bose store we stopped inside for a demo and to check the prices.  We started looking at other products and I was commenting how much cheaper prices were in the US when the salesperson asked me what the exact price was.  I didn’t know ‘exactly’ so I pulled my Treo (I got another “What is _that_!?” question), launched InfoMan’s Amazon module and within a minute had all of the information that I was looking for to everyone’s wonderment.

In the screenshots above, I searched for ‘Treo’ and after wirelessly downloading the data had a list of search results from Amazon.  I chose ‘palmOne Treo 650 PDA’ which brought up a page with Amazon’s price, a link for product features, the average user rating (after having a go at CNET we obviously need to do something about Amazon as well because the average was a paltry 2.5/5.0…) and a full editorial review.

Again some people will complain wondering why they should buy a separate application to conduct searches such as these that they can perform for free via their Treo web browser.  Again the answer is speed and data optimization.  Anyone who has attempted to do this via the browser will know that on the one hand it’s slow and on the other the page itself is not formatted for mobile browsing.

Additionally, considering that Currency and Amazon are but two of the eleven InfoMan modules – which include Weather for any world city, Phone Book (US White and Yellow Pages), Movie Showtimes, Box Office data, Stocks information, Jokes, Gas Prices, Horoscopes and Dreams – and that the developer has promised that many more new modules are under development I think that the price of $39.95 per year is steep but justifiable – I am certainly very excited to see such a good execution of web information being reformatted and optimized for the unique capabilities of our Treo.

InfoMan [Treonauts Software Store]

Treonauts are mad for information…