Recently a new startup in Germany released a task manager, called wunderlist. As I already did some reviews about GTD applications for the iPhone and because wunderlist is free I checked it out on day one. Not so impressive in my opinion. Good application, but requires some work to be really useful.

Today the iPad application called wunderlist HD has been released, again with great buzz around it. Downloaded it. Again not so impressive. Decided to write about it.

Don’t get me wrong, wunderlist and wunderlist HD look beautiful. They are developed using the Appcelerator platform which makes development for multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android….) relatively easy. Wunderlist offers cloud syncing. And it is actually a real, released product.

But in the end I think there are other alternatives (ToDo, 2Do, Toodledo to name a few) that are around way longer, offer more features and work faster (wunderlist sometimes reacts slowly). Also faster in terms of task entry and efficiency for me, the user. Furthermore others have proven over years to work and sync reliable and they improved their features over time…

So I really wonder what’s so wunderbar about wunderlist? To me it solves an already solved problem with more buzz, that’s it…

Since the review of Todo and Things a lot of things happened (and I don’t mean the US elections!) and recently a new Todo application has been added to Apples AppStore – the Remember The Milk app for the iPhone. Time to compare it with Appigo’s Todo application, which I use since September and was updated several times since then.

Remember The Milk for iPhone
It was just a matter of time until RTM would launch their own application. And while Todo can also sync with RTM this app is of course highly optimized for the own service. It features everything needed for GTD so I just want to outline the postive and negative highlights:

• RTM supports tags, locations and searching for tasks.
• It even allows saving the searches (“smart searches”) and re-use them at a later time – a very handy feature!
• The biggest drawback is the requirement for a Remember The Milk Pro account which costs USD 25,- per year. So while the application seems to be free it requires yearly payments to keep the service up and running.
• Another feature I was missing is “quick adding”, which is available in Todo. In RTM you have click many more times to simply add a task without further options to the Inbox. In Todo just click the quick-add button, enter the task title and press “Done” to add the task (with the default settings) to the current list. Very handy to take quick notes at any time.
• Also I dislike the blue title bar, which perfectly fits with the RTM corporate identity but makes the app look like any 99 cent todo application out there…

Todo (Appigo)
Since the last review two new releases have been published by Appigo. While the first one “only” contained bug fixes and translations the update to version 1.4 introduced a lot of great new features:

• Todo now supports contexts, which are automatically synced with Toodledo.
• It also syncs tags, which are a very handy way to categorize tasks even further.
• Todo learned searching tasks, unfortunately it does not offer to store the search like RTM does. Maybe this is included in a future release?

Whom to choose this time?
Based on the pros/cons above the USD 25,- price tag for the Remember The Milk application seems a bit high to me. Certainly you get a lot of options and access to one of the best GTD list managers out there. Nevertheless if you already have a working system it is not worth switching and migrating all your tasks, especially because both Appigo and Toodledo are updating their products constantly.
If you start from scratch also check out Toodledo for the iPhone, which supports all features available but yet has to proof that it is working as reliable as Todo.