Back in the 80s business people carried around a huge Filofax full of information. It stored their diary, ‘to do’ list, business cards and contact information. The thicker and more well used the Filofax, the more important you were perceived to be, to other people. People still carry around a diary or contact list, but they are not normally used for note taking and are not as prominent as they used to be, in the past.

The problem these days is that our contacts have all sorts of contact detail – multiple email addresses, ever-changing mobile phone numbers and so on. It would be far easier keeping this information on a dynamic device, such as your computer, mobile phone or PDA.

EssentialPIM Portable Edition is a version of the fantastic PIM that will enable you to take your data on the road. You can store all your ‘to do’ lists, track your calendar, store important notes and keep contacts within one user-interface. It works alongside Outlook and other PIMs too, so if you use this on your desktop computer, you can still transfer and import your contact information within EssentialPIM, when you want to go on the road.

If you store EssentialPIM Portable on an external USB key, any information you save back to the application is stored on the USB key, so nothing will be left on the host desktop computer. This means you can take your USB key with you, safe in the knowledge that your personal information is kept personal.

Note that there is a Pro and Free version of EssentialPIM Portable. The download here is for the free version which is feature-limited. For instance, the free version has no Outlook import option, no multi-user access, no contact groups and more.

This is a major (2.5) release of EssentialPIM and now enables you to synchronise your calendar with Windows Mobile 5.x and smartphones, two-way Google synchronisation, a sticky notes option to post your 'to do' notes to your desktop and many other improvements and fixes.