• Developer: 1312
  • Price: $2.99
  • Version: 1.1
  • App Reviewed on: iPhone 4

There are a lot of to-do list generators on the market and one of the newest, Pocket Lists, offers users a fairly solid feature set and should be seriously considered. Simple lists can be executed in Apple’s Reminders app for free, but for $2.99, users get all of the basics plus built-in optical character recognition (OCR), syncing with Google Tasks, Toodledo and iCal as well as a few more bells and whistles.
The OCR feature alone would be well worth the price, especially if the user has a lot of paper notes lying around. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped it to be, but my handwriting is terrible and I’d challenge any OCR to be able to decipher my chicken scratch. I did find that it worked decent with typed text. This could be useful for pulling text off of mail. One tip for best quality is using the erase function to get rid of unwanted marks that may muffle the message and try using the light and dark meter to ensure text is easily viewable.
Pocket Lists has other very helpful features such as syncing with Google Tasks. Note that this should be setup prior to creating tasks to sync as it’s a bit cumbersome after the fact. While in the app, the user need only turn on syncing in the settings tab and login with their Gmail information. I appreciated that I could enable syncing through the app and did not have to visit my email account. Syncing is also available with Toodledo and iCal. Although, I’m not sure why it syncs with a competing to-do list app such as Toodledo.
The app also includes a couple of useful tips and tricks such as shaking the iPhone while in a list to drop all completed tasks to the bottom. It has a stream function that displays all current to-do items on one screen, which works well if the user has created multiple projects. The user can also set tasks based on location as well as set to-dos by hierarchy. They can also sync lists between devices via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
Pocket Lists is a solid choice for those looking for a robust to-do list app that provides more than Apple’s basic Reminders app. With the potential of the OCR as well as syncing with various external task services, this app is a definite contender in the GTD category.