Comments on: Pocket Quicken 2.0 Released

I d/l'd it last night and installed it. A big improvement over version 1. Still not as slick as, say, QuikBudget, but it is great to be able to hotsync the last 3 months (or six or whatever you choose) of your register to the Palm. Budgeting remains the biggest weakness, with NO downloading of budget data from Quicken 2001. You have to create the budget by hand on the Palm, with every month being the same amount. To me, this remains a problem. If I'm out looking at an expensive toy ...er, Palmpilot... I need to know how much slack I have in my budget to cover it. Thats the kind of information you need right in the palm of your hand, and I think Landware has missed the point again and again regarding this. But overall, well worth the upgrade price if you already own version 1. Not sure if it's really worth $40, but if you live and die by Quicken on the desktop, its probably worth having it on your Palm, too.

It appears that there is a MacOS compatable conduit. Not exactly clear from their website.

I installed it last night and tried to link it with my Quicken 2001 Deluxe and failed every time. I kept getting an error when transferring my categories and data from my computer to my m505. I had Quicken 99 and PktQuicken 1.01 and it worked fine but now it's all screwed up.

Though they seem to have been removed with this new release, the PalmGear reviews of PocketQuicken 1.x were really bad -- slow support replies, years between upgrades, etc. While this upgrade appears much improved, I have to wonder whether they will keep up with the yearly releases of Quicken Desktop. I was also really surprised to see that PQ costs _more_ than I paid for Quicken itself (twice as much as Quicken Basic)!

The design philosophy behind PQ seems to be replicate the Quicken experience as completely as possible on the handheld. As with many other Palm apps, this isn't really what I want -- instead I want the limited interface I'll need on the road, which is primarily just data entry. I'm never going to balance my checkbook on my Palm.

I found an app called SplashMoney (See http://www.splashdata.com/splashmoney/index.htm) that had the more limited, "desktop tentacle" approach I wanted, and was $20 cheaper to boot. The support has been excellent -- they usually answer every mail within a day, if not a few hours.

The only real limitation is that it doesn't automatically sync data out of Quicken into the Palm, which it seems PQ 2.0 does. This isn't a drawback for me -- SplashMoney does do the Palm -> Quicken sync perfectly well -- but others may see it as one. I wish Intuit would open an API for handheld app authors to use, so that the company with worse support and higher prices wouldn't be the only one that can sync both ways. (When SplashMoney transactions appear in Quicken, they are labelled as coming from "PocketQuicken" -- as if it were the only handheld option!) That way the rich Palm app marketplace could compete on a level field for the best implementation. Maybe this exists, but it seems not to given PQ's by-name identification in Quicken.

Blah blah blah. Check out SplashMoney. $20 cheaper, and it does everything you'll ever need on the Palm.

I'd always heard that Pocket Money was a lot better than Pocket Quicken. How does this new version of Pocket Quicken address the deficiencies, relative to Pocket Money, that I've read/heard about over the years?

$40? Do they buy you dinner, first?

I'm surprised by the negative comments. I've found Landware responsive on tech support. It took a long time to develop this major upgrade, but I've been using PQ for weeks (I was a beta tester, no other relation to the company) and love it.

Some people just want to enter transactions on the fly, and PQ may be overkill for that. Even so, it does them very nicely: Recently I had the car repaired and wrote a "check" on my Palm while still in the shop. Next time I synced, the payment was queued for electronic transmission in desktop Quicken. That's a very nice feature -- instead of making a To Do reminding me to pay someone, I just pay them.

I also really like carrying a year's transactions on the Palm. I've got 1293 transactions from 28 accounts and 63 memorized transactions -- and the total PQ data takes up 165k on the Palm. I seem to find myself once a week or so in a conversation with my wife or a vendor on whether we made the final kids camp payment, or whether a check cleared, and I have the answer in my pocket.

PQ now lets you sync investment account values, so you can keep running tabs on your Schwab account or 401k.

For me the biggest hole is inability to get transactions or portfolio details on investments. I'd sure like a summary of holdings and latest prices, but that's going to have to await a future version.

I love this software! But it's hard to pay as much as I did for the full blown desktop version for a miniature Palm version. I just don't know if $40 is worth it for the conveniece of not carrying my receipts home or keeping a mental note of my balances. Now, if they offered a $15 upgrade for Quicken DESKTOP owners, that would be very cool!

BankBook3 is 15.00 and it sync's
with Quicken or Money. It works
beautifully. You can see Balance
for a Date, posted or cleared. HANDANGO.COM I really was pleasantly suprised.
Regards, Bill

need QUICKBOOKS PRO vERSION