First Look: Bento for iPhone and iPod touch

I have previously bought Zenbe & Handbase & today bought Bento & Appcreator.

Handbase: very fully featured, but I found syncing to be not very reliable (lost records) & their visual/interaction design leaves a lot to be desired. I dropped because of unreliability of syncing & ugliness

Zenbe: Simple. Nice syncing with website/service. Very simple but works well for what it is - a single field list manager

Bento: A bit disappointed. Expected more from these guys in terms of the interaction design. The general layout & some of the implementation like "collections" (tags) is not very well thought out. Doesn't have any view capability

AppCreator: Pretty impressive. Current favourite. Supports 1-m relationships. Lots of power. Smart in-build webserver so you can edit databases on your PC. Best database mgr on the iphone

I've downloaded this, and it seems to work more or less as advertised. It looks like it will be nice to use, for example, for having a client database on my phone that I sometimes need access to, but don't want in my personal address book. I was a little disappointed to see that checkboxes in the desktop app convert to "on/off" switches in the iPhone app. I realize that both essentially represent binary entry, but the solution on the phone is, well, inelegant.

On a different but related note - if they can manage the time and effort to design syncing to a completely different device, where is the option to sync the desktop libraries across multiple computers? Bento is a wonderful product, but this feature - very useful for multiple computer users - has been glaringly absent since version 1.

Shameless plug:

Coincidently, AppCreator Database Manager for iPhone and iPod touch has just been released today. It lets you import/export and even editing data in your web browser via WiFi.

See AppCreator in action at http://tinyurl.com/appcreator (YouTube link)

iTunes Store URL: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=314153944&mt=8

does this mean we might get iWork for iPhone at WWDC?

Bento is the unofficial "Access-like" component of iWork. I'd venture the "other guys" at Apple have their part just about done too.

Cool looking app. Video looks like the Sham-Wow video. They could have hidden the mouse when capturing the video.

This great product is scared with a sub-par video. It's very reminiscent to their wack-a-mole video. Here's a tip FileMaker, invest in some marketing strategy!!

Dear Bento,

I love you.

sincerely,
Dave

HandBase imports/exports regular CSV and tab separated text files, not requiring another application. Bento, on the other hand, only synchronize with desktop Bento databases.

Just bought it and its great! Great integration with the "easy to use" Bento for Mac! A must have ...cheers from Portugal

I look forward to the full review. I haven't used Bento, but this does make me tempted. I've been looking at HanDBase as a way to get some database-type data on the iPhone. I'd love to see a side-by-side comparison. It seems like any truly useful database ap (for me, at least) will need to be able to get data from outside the ap itself. I'm not typing in all my entries on the pretend keyboard. HanDBase and Bento both sound like they'll do this, but with extra software. Price tag is higher for Bento, and it only works on a Mac, but if it's a better database application, it could be the way to go. It certainly sounds like it's better integrated with other iPhone services. But more important then that, to me, is how easy it is (or is not) share data with other applications. Importing/Exporting different formats would probably be key, because it's unlikely that I'll spend any amount of time doing data entry in Bento or HanDBase. I just need a way take information I already have and make it mobile.

With this app Filemaker is continuing their excellent Bento pricing policy in the sense that it is £2.99 in UK which at today's rate is $4.52!