[HTC Excalibur] anewbie:
Thank you all for the suggestions! I thought I'd spend a few words sharing my opinions on the products I've been trying out:

Agenda One - in spite of the awards the company claims they have received, I find this product adds very little value to the existing WM 6.1 PIM functionality. Some pretty colors, that's it. When I started my quest for a better PIM, all I was looking for was a search function. Agenda One has it. I had made many variations of attempts to use it, search all, search in appointments only, search in todos only, search whole word, partial word, any words .... Not once did it ever complete the search with any result. Every single time, the function started, try for a while, then the program crashed. It simply terminate. I submitted the question to the company's support forum, the question itself didn't get posted until 5 days later - as the moderator has to screen every single post. When it did appear, other user indicated same problem on other smart phone as well. I'm not the only one.

Edit: the forum blocked my complaint, and finally come back with a question - it remotely sounds like it cares, but the question is useless. If they read my post, they would have found the answer there. I feel like dealing with a communist government official - sensor everything, sloooooooooow to respond and defend every criticism ...

Papyrus 2.0 - the calendar layouts are reasonably flexible, so you can customize how you want to see all the activities. The search is very fast, even if I have more than 30 matches, they show up as soon as the program finds them. There is one thing I don't like, but I suspect I may be able to figure out a way to change, that is, I only want to see todos that are not yet completed on a daily basis. Even though I have that specified, it is still showing me the todos that are already marked complete (not all of them, just the ones that have no dates associated with). To me, they are done, they are done. Why would I want to look at them everyday just because their complete dates were not marked? Other than that, everything seems to be pretty good. They've got nice colors just like Agenda One, and price is about the same.

Agendus Pro - Agendus Pro has a rich set of nice features - in addition to the regular calendar/todo/contact views, you can also access call log, email, quote of the day, day in history, weather forecast, and stock quote all from this application. I didn't think about these before, but, they are very nice to have. The cost of this product is no more than the others. Another nice feature - there is a tool bar (either on top or bottom of the screen) you can use to select the format of display (day view, week view, month view, list, contact, email, etc, etc. With the other products (Agenda One, and Papyrus), you have to press the view soft bottom, which brings up another screen that let you select the format. Agendus layout is more intuitive and direct.

Having said all of that, I do have a couple of complaints -

- Agendus Pro take up 3.7 MB, whereas Papyrus - 700 KB, Agenda One - 966 KB. These are the cab size, I know that Agendus Pro includes several language supports, which contribute to the bigger CAB size. Nevertheless, the memory foot print is still the biggest among the 3.

- my 2nd complaint is that when you load the program just to look at some details in an appointment, the program starts and you don't see anything in the calendar - it tells you that you don't have any activity. Then, a little box flashes "initializing ...", "initializing ...", "initializing ..." ... My screen went out 4 times before I can finally see the content of my day's calendar. If it takes less memory, I may just keep it running, which would not have the "initializing ..." problem. Since the program takes up so much memory, I don't want to keep it in the memory. This is a deal killer for me. It's too bad. I like the features a lot.

Edit: Since the above was written, I've tried two more software packages. Nothing stood out. One fenomenal ability make Papyrus shine among all the others is how fast the search function performs. Everyone else wait, and wait, and wait until they've collected all the matches and put them on the screen all at once. If you have a sizable database (mine has about 2000 entries), you'll be staring at a blank screen with a spinning wheel forever, the screen saver would kick in multiple times. Whereas Papyrus' search shows you the match results as it progresses through the database. Maybe the match I am looking for is the first couple out of 50, why would I need to wait until it finds 50 before showing me first two? That's just a simply logic. I don't get what the other developers were thinking ....

Needless to say, Papyrus 2.0 becomes my choice.

Their forum is great, too! Very happy about this decision

thanks!