A Personal Assistant – Pageonce

CTA RATING:

A Personal Assistant by Pageonce Inc. is a pretty impressive account manager for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  Take a look at the picture above; it’s free.  We were surprised to see such a well supported and jack-of-all-trades application like this available for free, and we are definitely impressed by its capabilities.  With that said, we’ll walk you through a full run-down of the app following the break.

We’ll start off with some of the concerns we had from the get go: we are in fact entrusting all of our account information to Pageonce so that we can be better organized.  For those of you who have our same level of concern, we recommend that you read their Security Statement. It made us feel a lot better about using the application and also helped understand why we cannot edit or pay balances from the application itself.  This is strictly an account manager, i.e. you can view the balance and make adjustments elsewhere if need be.

Now that our security concerns are out of the way, we can talk about what this app can really do for you.  We spent the better portion of 2 hours trying to get all of our accounts added to the Pageonce online profile.  We can’t think of any other account types we would like to see supported, but that’s just us.  With that said, Pageonce supports: Financial accounts (credit cards, banking, loans, etc.), Shopping accounts (Blockbuster cards, Starbucks gift cards, etc.), Utility accounts (cell phone, cable, electricity, etc.), Social accounts (digg, YouTube, MySpace, etc), Travel accounts (United Airlines, Hilton, etc.) and Email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.).  Out of those options, we decided to setup our financial, utility, and social accounts because we don’t need our email available through Pageonce, nor do we consistently have shopping or travel accounts that we need to manage.  We were surprised to see that our local bank was listed but haven’t been able to get it working fully since we added it a week ago.  On that note, we also had a few issues with Comcast and Juniper accounts. All three of those accounts have at one point or another shown, “We are currently experiencing a problem with this account.”  Comcast is currently working, and our local bank account has been working for a couple of days, but the Juniper account has never worked. We don’t know if these issues are widespread or not, but you could let us know your experience in the comments.  

Now that all of our accounts are setup, we have access to all most of our account data so that we can check balances and monitor account transactions all from our iPhones.  Our Digg account shows us a basic profile view with things like the total number of articles we’ve dugg, our comments, articles submitted, etc.  We don’t really keep track of this stuff, but we understand that a lot of you might and will find this feature tremendously helpful. YouTube shows us recommended videos and also includes a “Profile” link and a “My Status” link.  Neither of those links seem to be doing much of anything at the moment and are probably supposed to take us to a new page in Safari so we can view that information.  As far as our financial accounts go, we’re not getting into very much detail, because we don’t want you to know all of our different accounts.  Duh.  We can tell you that most of our accounts show us the balance, available credit, next payment size and due date, and the most recent transactions for each account.  This can be very handy if you’re always on the go and not in front of your computer to manage or check each account.  

Just a quick run-through of the application pages:  The Accounts tab shows up by default after logging into your Pageonce account.  Here you can find all of your accounts listed by flicking through the pages, much like Apple’s springboard flick.  Tap an account, and it’ll show you whatever information is available.  To click out of an account, tap the “x” at the top right portion of the screen, and it’ll take you back to the Accounts tab.  The Feeds tab will show you whatever updates it can… usually based on how your accounts send information to you.  Right now, AT&T is telling us we’ve used more than 80% of our plan and a credit card is telling us that what is left in our line of credit.  Notice of new emails, shipped movies from Netflix and many other feeds will come through if you have accounts setup for them.  Lastly, the Settings tab has only two, but very critical, features.  The first is one we’d recommend for all users: it toggles between secure and unsecure.  By default, the application saves your password to the iPhone so you don’t have to enter it each time you Launch the app.  Get rid of this, please.  If you ever lose your phone, it would make it exponentially easy for someone to see your accounts.  Granted, they could never modify them, but they can see them nonetheless.  The other feature there has the ability to remove all of the the account information from the iPhone.  That way, no one would even be able to see what you use for your account name.  Only the most paranoid users would want to delete the account each time, but we suspect there may be some.

We really enjoy using this application to keep a constant monitor on our accounts but still wish there were a few more glitches fixed and abilities added.

• We hear that account balances have a tendency to get rounded to the nearest dollar.  Not so good.  A few cents can make a world of difference in the financial world.
• If you advertise support for accounts, why don’t they work?  We know we’re not alone here.  Our usernames and passwords work, but the information still isn’t coming through.  What gives?
• We’d really like to see a way to arrange our accounts in the summary page and have it mimic that of the iPhone’s Springboard.
• Possible website issues with Safari?  Maybe it’s just us, but if you’ve designed an app for a good majority of Mac users, why isn’t your website fully supported?  Just a thought.  Firefox works well.
• The color scheme is a little difficult to read: dark lettering on a dark background is never really a good choice. Maybe we could see this tweaked a bit in the next version.
• We don’t want it to save our actual account information, but we would like to see links to the login page directly in the app.  If we notice something awry, we can just tap and sign in to figure it out.
• Better icon support, please!  We’re tired of seeing the Pageonce logo on our accounts.  We’d really prefer to see my companies’ logos on them.
• We don’t care if you want our feedback, don’t send us email!  I just want to use your service and not get dumb emails like, “Join us on our Forums.”