Step aside, Mint. Pageonce just launched a major update to its iPhone application, and it blows you out of the water. Pageonce’s v3 update is absolutely fantastic, and Mint’s app pales in comparison. Pageonce’s premium app, A Personal Assistant Premium, allows you to connect all of your online accounts to one login (and one application). What do we mean by all accounts? We mean damn near everything: from Facebook and Twitter to American Express to AT&T Wireless, Pageonce allows you to connect with pretty much every account that you have online.
Quick disclosure: Pageonce recently provided refreshments at a CrunchGear meetup. I wasn’t at this event, though, and didn’t know about it until after I wrote this article.
Unlike Mint, which only focuses on financial accounts, Pageonce pulls information from six different types of accounts: Travel (i.e. frequent flyer programs), Finance (bank accounts), Social, Utilities (bills), Email and Shopping (Amazon or eBay). It is amazing how many different accounts they fit into those six buckets. Netflix? Check. Starbucks card? Check. LinkedIn? Check. YouTube? StumbleUpon? DirecTV? Allstate? Gmail? Check, Check, Check, Check and… Check. There’s no point in getting individual apps for each account anymore. As soon as Pageonce adds a few more features (more on that below) and allows you to wholly interface with each of these accounts from their site/app, it will serve as the primary hub to your various online identities.
The interface is clean and easy to navigate. It displays the most relevant information from your accounts, and doesn’t bother you with stuff you don’t need. For example, I could quickly browse my most recent credit card transactions and the outstanding balance on my bank account. Then, with one tap, I moved over to checking the time of my upcoming flight from DC to San Francisco. Two more taps and I was browsing the subject lines of my Gmail account. It was extremely intuitive to find what I was looking for, and the information was fairly up-to-date (though there were some things that were not up-to-the-minute). I even did a field test to compare its timeliness to Mint. I found 2 major transactions that were posted to my bank account in the last 24 hours that appeared on Pageonce but not on Mint (yes, even after I hit the refresh button and Mint claimed it was updated). That pretty much sealed it for me.
Though, honestly, I was sold from the beginning. Setup was a breeze. I just logged into Pageonce on my laptop and punched in my account information for everything I could remember off-hand. It even provided suggestions in each of the aforementioned categories of accounts, so I didn’t forget much. But, for the account or two I did forget to add, I could easily add the information from the iPhone app directly. There were a few hiccups, though. Facebook and a few of my bank accounts required additional steps to verify that I wasn’t some hacker trying to post nude pictures on my Facebook account.
And though you can’t directly post pictures on your Facebook account from Pageonce, one of the best parts of this app is that if you do want to dive deeper into a specific account, you can. For example, if you want to send a quick tweet out after looking over your finances, you can log into Twitter from within the app, without having to remember your ID and password. It was easy enough: a few taps on the screen and I was typing an update to my Twitter account. However, I don’t think it will replace TweetDeck (my favorite iPhone twitter app) just yet. It just doesn’t have all of the features you would want like an easy way to reply to a tweet or post a re-tweet.
Also, due to the fact that Pageonce aggregates all of your accounts, there were some limits in functionality. For example, though I could see a “summary” of my finances (the individual balances on my credit cards and bank accounts), Pageonce did not add them up to me to show me what my cash flow was like nor did it provide me with an estimate of my net worth. Honestly, though, that is just a matter of time, and I expect Pageonce to provide the financial tools that Mint does very soon.
Pageonce effectively combines all your accounts into one, and has created an accompanying iPhone app that will truly transform the way you interact with your online user accounts. Nobody wants to log into 15 different websites every time they are at a computer (or on their iPhone), and Pageonce has solved that problem wonderfully. If you have an iPhone and more than 3 online accounts (so, everybody who has an iPhone), buy Pageonce’s Personal Assistant for $6.99. You can thank me later.
What we like:
- The Value Proposition. Sometimes a company makes a product that just plain provides value. Pageonce has done that, and I can’t imagine the value proposition to the user being much better.
- Ease of Use. The UI is simple and clean. It gives you everything you want, when you want it, and nothing you don’t.
- Access to everything. I was extremely hard-pressed to find an online account that Pageonce doesn’t allow you to access. Pageonce even reminded me of accounts that I didn’t even remember I had.
What we didn’t like:
- Some missing functionality. Frankly, I don’t feel right making this complaint, but I will anyways: tweeting was a bit hard and I couldn’t write great e-mails from within the app.
- A summary of my financials. Again, I’m just nitpicking, but I didn’t get a full picture of my net worth or the ability to balance my budgets like I can with Mint.