Well, as I stated in an earlier post, I tried todoMatrix from Rexwireless. At that time, I mentioned that I was leaning toward purchasing it because everything I had seen from it was quite good. I was worried that I might miss the integration with Outlook, though, so that gave me a little bit of a reason to think about whether or not it was the right purchase.

I bought it Friday, and I have absolutely no regrets. It's a great task management system for the BlackBerry. I've been a long time PocketPC user (started with a brick called the Casiopeia E-125) and have been a BlackBerry user only for about six months. What I have seen of BlackBerry apps is that they tend not to be quite ready for release (developers' fault, not the BlackBerry's), but in general they improve over time. todoMatrix was ready for release.

The drawer and folder views, click-wheel options, overall app functionality are all very intuitive. There will be a very low learning curve. In fact, most folks won't need to even look at the user guide (a downloadable PDF). The alerts work as you would want them to work, and the ability to set a specific snooze time is very nice. The hot-keys work, even on 7100 models (well, most of them anyway). For hot-keys where the second letter on a key is the hot-key, simply pressing the Alt key followed by the letter gets you want you want it to do. The most common hot-keys are always right there at the bottom of the screen. Very helpful. A list of others is a hot-key away.

I sent Rexwireless some suggestions on Friday and I received a very nice e-mail reply within 30 minutes. Some of my suggestions included changing the task count to not include completed tasks. Right now, the total number of tasks in a folder is listed by the folder, regardless of whether or not a task is complete. Their plans are to change the task count to read 2 / 5 To-do's, where the first number indicates open tasks and the second indicates total tasks in a folder.

Another suggestion was to implement the ability for phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and website URIs to show up as hyperlinks. This would be helpful when setting a task to call someone. John from Rexwireless indicated this was a bigger task than it looks like, but they have added it to their customer suggestions to look at again in the fall.

Other minor suggestions included the ability to change the display font style and size and the ability to use a key to expand and collapse drawers and folders. I suggested the Enter key for this, but that isn't possible. I didn't know it at the time, but there's a hot-key (X) that should do that. That would be perfectly fine, except this seems to be the one hot-key I've come across that doesn't work on the 7100 models (at least not on my 7130e).

The price is a little steep, but I've always been willing to pay for software that delivers what it's supposed to and is helpful to me in my day-to-day activities. todoMatrix does that extremely well!

And when they release impactMatrix, those of who use a convergence of GTD and Covey methods (I do) may very well have the best of both worlds. Perhaps they can add a click-wheel menu item that allows you to move from one app to the other, making the three Matrix apps more like a suite than individual applications?