For new contacts, Call Tracker allows you to add a name and phone number to the Address Book by selecting a menu command. Unfortunately, you can't enter any company information because of a limitation in the way Call Tracker parses the text entered in the single name/company field. Call Tracker also doesn't provide a direct link to a contact in the Address Book. If you realize you have an old number in your Address Book, or for some other reason want to jump right to the contact, you must open up the Address Book and look up the record manually, requiring several more steps than were required in PhoneLog.

Incoming call record in Call Tracker
Like PhoneLog, Call Tracker provides lots of room for notes for each message. Call Tracker, however, doesn't show the contents of the notes field unless you tap on the note icon. PhoneLog shows two lines of the note with a scroll bar at the bottom of the call edit screen, providing a convenient view of the note. This came in handy, and as a result, I tended to use notes more in PhoneLog and less in Call Tracker. Call Tracker also provides several more lines than PhoneLog for the subject of the call, which may seem like an unnecessary use of space to the concise-minded but a welcome luxury for those who need to record lots of details.

Incoming calls have a Follow Up button, as shown in Figure E, that generates a linked Scheduled Call record with all the appropriate information (name, number, etc.) copied over. Scheduled calls have optional alarms that are very useful reminders for placing a phone call at a specific time. A pop up menu provides quick settings for 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, 1-3 hours, 1 day, or a custom time for the alarm.

FIGURE E

There's lots of space to record call details.

Scheduled Calls have a Place Call button that generates a linked Outgoing Call record with all the necessary information copied over. Outgoing calls have a field for Results, with a pop up menu for "Call Complete", "Left Voice Mail", and so forth. Call Tracker's settings allow you to set calls to be deleted after the Follow Up or Place Call buttons are tapped. I found the setting that deletes Scheduled Call records after the call has been placed to be quite useful.

While Call Tracker does link Incoming Calls to Scheduled Calls, and Scheduled Calls to Outgoing Calls, it would be great if Call Tracker went one step further and, like modern email programs, showed in the Incoming Call record and the main view that a follow-up was made to a call.

Main View
Call Tracker provides a chronological list of calls that is easily configurable to show Incoming Calls, Outgoing Calls, and Scheduled Calls, or any combination of the three. You can see this nicely in Figure F.

FIGURE F

You can see all of your calls quite clearly in Call Tracker's main view.

Call Tracker allows 1-6 columns of information to be displayed, including date, time, name, subject, result, notes, and call duration. You can manually adjust the column widths, so you can see the full contact name. This is a nice feature not available in Action Names or PhoneLog. I found 2-3 columns of info to be the limit for the Palm's small screen.