It's back to school time, and you know what that means. You've got a good excuse to try out some new software for your PDA.

Windows Mobile devices include some great tools for students, including a basic calculator, calendar, and mobile versions of Word and Excel. But if you want to get the most out of your PDA on campus, you'll probably want to check out some more advanced tools for text entry, note taking, and organization.

Let's start by taking a look at some applications designed with students in mind.

The Dog Ate It

Windows Mobile PDAs and phones include a basic calendar for jotting down appointments. But it's not much use if you need to view a week's worth of information at a glance. For day to day use, we're big fans of Pocket Informant. But for students, The Dog Ate It offers a great calendar with a few extra features.

First of all, you can enter a list of classes and times and they'll automatically be added to your calendar. For each class you can specify your instructor's name, contact info, and required textbooks.

The Dog Ate It also lets you keep track of your grades and homework assignments. There's a free trial available, but a full version will cost you $15. There's also a desktop version of the software which can be synchronized with your PDA.

SpeedScript is an innovative program (one of many) aimed at making it easy to enter text on mobile devices. With all the talk about whether the iPhone's lack of a physical keyboard is an advantage or a detriment, it's easy to forget that folks have been struggling with on-screen text entry methods ever since the days of the Apple Newton. See how it all comes full circle back to Apple?

Anyway, as we've mentioned before, SpeedScript is available for Windows Mobile devices for about $13. But SpeedScript is also testing tablet and UMPC versions of the software. And when we say testing, we mean if you download a copy today, they're not going to charge you for a year. That should be more than enough time to figure out whether SpeedScript actually saves you any time.

[via jkOnTheRun]

Text entry on mobile devices has never been what you would call a pleasant experience. These days, many PDA and smartphones often include built in keyboards for typing with your thumbs. But if you're an old fashioned stylus warrior, there are a few ways to improve the hunt and peck experience.

While Microsoft includes an on-screen keyboard and several types of handwriting recognition to choose from, here are a few third party programs that might make typing on your Windows Mobile device faster and easier.

Tengo

Tengo is a pretty nifty application that brings predictive text to Windows Mobile. Technically, it was there all along, with Microsoft integrating a word suggestion feature. But Tengo makes typing with an on-screen keyboard a bit more like typing on a cellphone keypad. And believe it or not, that's a good thing.

TenGo divides presents you with a QWERTY-style keyboard, but the 26 letters of the alphabet are divided up into 6 zones. You don't have to hit a letter precisely, you just have to hit the zone it is in. As you add more letters, TenGo will try to guess the word you're trying to enter. It works surprisingly well.

When I got my first PDA years ago, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I could enter text quicker using the letter recognizer or the on-screen keyboard. Since I often use my PDA to take notes, the answer quickly presented itself: they're both really slow.

SpeedScript is an alternative text entry program based on the concept that when you type a letter, 50% of the time the next character you will need is a vowel or a space. So when you tap a letter, a little blue box opens up, letting you slide the stylus to those characters. If that isn't clear, check out this video.



It looks a bit confusing in high speed, but since there's only a few characters in the blue box, you can memorize their locations pretty quickly. Still, I find that blue box rather distracting. Personally I prefer TenGO for quick stylus-based text input. Of course, the quickest solution is to plug in an external keyboard, but that only works if you have room in your bag for the keyboard, and the time to unfold it and plug it in.

SpeedScript is available for $12.99. A free trial is available, which lets you write up to 7,000 characters. I like this as a method for letting you try the program before you buy it, rather than having the program expire in a few days whether you've used it or not.

It's clear that nobody has truly solved the problem of how to efficiently enter text into a device that does not have a full-sized keyboard, judging by the sheer volume of software that exists to attempt this feat. AdapTex is interesting in that it is a slightly different take on this age-old problem. Rather than trying to replace your favorite text input method, AdapTex exists to augment it with word and phrase suggestions that, if correct, can significantly cut down on the number of letters or words you need to manually type.

Although I haven't been using it long enough for the adaptation process to truly start understanding my most popular words and phrases, already I can see some benefit as AdapTex understands some very common ways that sentences start, given one or two initial words. Probably my only complaint with this sort of system is that I'm already fast enough at entering text on my device (I happen to use a Pocket PC) that stopping to read the suggestions actually just slows me down if it doesn't happen to suggest something that is useful for me. In fact, often I could have already typed the whole sentence in the time it takes to type a bit, stop and scan, type a bit more, stop and scan...

Of course, for people that are painfully slow at entering text on a mobile device, software like this could be a real lifesaver. I'm going to continue to use the software until the free trial expires before deciding if it adds enough to my text input speed to justify the approximately $50 USD regular price (after exchange). If you're interested, you can still get in on the beta, and be eligible to purchase the software for an introductory sale price that will save you approximately $20.

TenGO is an alternative input panel for Pocket PCs and other mobile devices that we've covered previously here at Download Squad. They're worth mentioning again first because they offer a truly useful and faster way to input text than those that ship natively on Pocket PCs, and second because they have set up a new site, called TenGO Challenge.

TenGO Challenge is a new project that the TenGO team is putting together as a response to the amount of feedback they received regarding the "TenGO Girls" - three girls who can input text using a stylus (obviously using TenGO) at rates of 70 to 75 WPM. TenGO has the amazing videos showing the girls doing their thing on their site. Apparently they've had a number of people contact them to complain that either they didn't believe the videos, or they thought they could do better. So TenGO is launching a competition on the TenGO Challenge site.

TenGO is looking to get over 1000 users to submit typing speeds of over 50 WPM within the next 3 months. Give it a shot!