.KEYWORD myinfo
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Review your online accounts wirelessly with MyInfo
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY Completing his look at the MyPalm portal, Ray Rischpater reviews MyInfo, a handy service that lets you access financial and travel account summaries from the Web or your wireless Palm handheld.
.AUTHOR Ray Rischpater
In this article, I’ll continue my examination of the MyPalm portal, which began in the August 2001 issue of PalmPower at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200108/mypalm001.html. This time around, I’ll focus on the MyInfo portion of the portal.
MyInfo lets you access financial and travel account summaries from the Web or your wireless Palm handheld using the Palm Mobile Internet Kit or a Palm VII series handheld computer. Developed with Yodlee, MyInfo is perhaps the best-known example of account aggregation, which lets service providers offer a single personalized page to your myriad personal accounts.
.CALLOUT It’s easy to take MyInfo for granted. It’s like paying for gas at the pump with your debit card–once you do it, you can’t imagine doing it any other way.
The concept behind account aggregation is simple: you log into a single Web site (MyInfo at http://myinfo.palm.net), and you’re presented with a list of your accounts and their balances, such as your checking account, investment account, and credit cards. From that page, you can select a specific account, and the service opens a new window, taking you to the online site for the account you’ve selected. From there, you’re connected directly to your bank-no need to enter additional passwords, your account number, or anything else. It’s the first step towards the Web-based e-wallet, where you’ll be able to manage accounts and make transactions, and someday purchases, directly from your handheld, without needing to pull out your credit cards or cash.
.H1 Using MyInfo
MyInfo is the easiest part of MyPalm to use, both on the Web and wirelessly. Figure A shows the login screen.
.FIGPAIR A Here’s the MyInfo login screen.
Like other services, you must first set up a personal account with your login and password. Signing up for MyInfo is more like creating a traditional bank account than signing up for an online service; the questions you answer help MyInfo identify you and establish your initial accounts. Palm has expressed commitment regarding both your identification information and your account information, and all communications from login to logout are protected using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) on the Web. Whether these assurances are enough for you to trust MyInfo is a personal decision, although in practice it’s likely to be no riskier to use than any online access to your existing accounts. In other words, if you already trust online banking, you’ll probably trust MyInfo.
After you log in, you’re presented with a list of your accounts and their balances, as shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B Here’s the MyInfo Account Summary screen.
This page is self-explanatory. You can break your accounts down into Travel and Finance categories, or you can see all balances at a glance. Clicking the account name brings you to the account provider’s Web site, logging you in automatically. You can also use the pulldown menu on the left of an account to do the same, or see a MyInfo-generated graph of recent account activity. This data is provided by the MyInfo service as it queries your account on a regular basis, so it’s not useful until you’ve used the service for a month or so.
Of course, the first time you log in, you won’t have any accounts. You can press the Add a New Account button to add a new account, such as your checking or savings account. You’ll see the screen in Figure C, where you can locate your account provider by name or by category.
.FIGPAIR C Here’s the MyInfo Add a New Account screen.
The number of account providers is simply staggering; it’s almost always quickest to type in a name in the search box and hit the Go button.
Once you’ve found your account provider, you can either enter the existing information you use to log into your online account, or you can create a new online account with your provider. In my case, I was still living in the last century and successfully created online accounts for each of my banks from MyPalm and then updated MyPalm’s account information.
Because some accounts you may want to track don’t have online access, you can also create a custom account and use it to track the value of a fixed asset such as your home or stamp collection. Fixed accounts operate the same as an online account, except that you must enter the changing value of the account yourself. Typically, you won’t do that very often-perhaps every time you have the item appraised. You can also use custom accounts to provide single-click login access to accounts that aren’t supported by MyInfo. We use this to track the appraised value of our home, giving us a notion of how much equity we have.
Of course, you only go through this configuration hassle once-after that, the information’s there every time you log in. That’s the beauty of MyInfo. Not only can you see a snapshot in numbers, but you can also view a pie chart of your holdings, letting you know where your money is.
In addition to financial information, you can use MyInfo to track your travel itineraries, confirmation numbers, and seat assignments, as well as your frequent flier status. I don’t have any upcoming trips, so I didn’t test this thoroughly, but it does appear to work as advertised. If you’re a business traveler, this may well be more useful than tracking your portfolio while on the road.
One last feature, the Alert feature, is somewhat misnamed. I’d hoped it would let me set up online alerts, such as "Warn me when my checking account balance is less than $250.00." Instead, alerts appear to be MyPalm’s information service, letting you know about updates and new features. While helpful, this is somewhat confusing, especially given financial sites’ use of the term "alert" and the fact that MyPalm instead uses pop-up windows on logins for the same purpose.
.H1 MyInfo Wireless
MyInfo really shines when you use it wirelessly. You can download the MyInfo Web clipping application from the MyInfo site to your Palm handheld and obtain the same information wirelessly as you can from the Web. Downloading is easy. Simply hit the MyInfo for Palm VII button from any page of MyInfo online and follow the instructions to download the installer and install it on your handheld. The downloaded query application is a PC executable, but you can still expand it using Stuffit Expander on the Macintosh. The resulting application works on any Palm handheld with the Mobile Internet Kit, including the Palm VII series handhelds.
Figure D shows the MyInfo login screen on my Palm m505 handheld.
.FIG D Here’s how MyInfo looks on the Palm handheld.
I successfully used it with both my cell phone–dialing my local ISP (Internet Service Provider) and an Intel Xircom wireless adapter, as shown in Figure E.
.FIG E Here are query results from MyInfo on the Palm handheld.
.CALLOUT MyInfo is easy to use and provides a clear benefit to users.
MyInfo is well suited to the query-response model Web clipping applications use, and the performance of the Palm OS application is much faster than using MyInfo on line. In fact, I generally don’t bother with the Web site, but instead pick up my Palm handheld with its wireless adapter and check my bank balances before paying my bills.
.H1 Closing comments
On the user interface front, MyInfo shows significantly more polish than the rest of MyPalm, but even here there are a few things that deserve attention. Top on my list is the misnamed Alerts feature; I hope that either I’m wrong and Palm will add what I’d consider to be alerts soon, or that they rename Alerts to something more descriptive.
Similarly, button placement (both real buttons such as the MyInfo for Palm VII and icon buttons such as the lock and help) strikes me as odd. The MyInfo for Palm VII button, for example, is prominently displayed next to more commonly used buttons such as Add a New Account and Preferences. While it’s good to have it there the first time around, it’s annoying to see every time I log in, simply because I’ve already done it. Why take up the space? This is even true of "Add a New Account," which probably belongs in Preferences. It would be better if it were along the side bar, perhaps below the other MyPalm items. The lock icon is equally annoying; instead of signifying something being locked, it’s a link to Palm’s privacy policy. While I appreciate being able to access the privacy policy quickly, it’s not something I do every day. Moreover, the lock’s not going to change. It’s a button, not an enunciator the way it is on other Web sites.
A final annoyance is the banner space Palm reserved along the top of each page, presumably for further advertising. The empty banner in MyInfo is disorienting, simply because my first instinct is to wonder why they don’t slide the content up, so I don’t have to scroll. Paradoxically, this never occurs to me when I look at a traditional advertisement-funded Web site! I admit it’s a nit to pick, but I think it’s an important one: some users may be surprised when advertisements start popping up there. It might have been better if Palm ran advertisements of their own products in that space, the way they did during the early days of MyPalm.
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These, however, are minor blemishes on what is a fundamentally easy-to-use service. From a workflow perspective, MyInfo is easy to use (significantly easier than parts of MyPalm), and provides a clear benefit to users.
In one sense, it’s easy to take MyInfo for granted. It’s like paying for gas at the pump with your debit card–once you do it, you can’t imagine doing it any other way. At the core, I think that’s the sign of a successful online application. It’s simple, unobtrusive, and saves time and effort. As an efficiency expert, that may be something to be extremely excited about, but the rest of us can just sit back, use it, and enjoy the rest of our day.
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on MyInfo, visit http://myinfo.palm.net.
For the article, "A look at the MyPalm portal," by Ray Rischpater in the August 2001 issue of PalmPower, visit http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200108/mypalm001.html.
For more information about Palm computers, visit http://www.palm.com.
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.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Ray Rischpater is a freelance author entranced by mobile devices, having published several books and articles on the topic, including Palm Enterprise Applications: A Wireless Tech Brief, from John Wiley and Sons. He lives near Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and son.
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