Notifier’s home screen condenses quick snapshots of data from various sources into: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.”

For the past week, I’ve been testing an application called Notifier by iSkoot Inc. (iSkoot.com), which is designed to give basic cellphones a smart-phone-like shot in the arm. Notifier aggregates updates from various sources and social communities — including email, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds and instant messaging — into one application made for no-frills phones.

I tried Notifier on a Samsung Propel that costs $50 with a two-year contract and rebate. I appreciated the app’s way of keeping so much content in one spot, which saved me from checking various places for information. And Notifier is designed so you should need to sign into an account only once. But I found serious drawbacks in the experience.

Unlike on a BlackBerry or an iPhone, on which you can place programs you use frequently on the very first screen, Notifier is buried on the phone in a section called “My Stuff,” under a section called “Games and Apps,” which takes 10 clicks to reach. That’s a tremendous pain when you just want to quickly check Facebook. There aren’t any shortcuts or hard keys on phones that will open Notifier more quickly.

Second, Notifier’s user interface can be awkward. Posting updates to my social networks through Notifier was a clumsy process that was riddled with extra steps. My phone even had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but I preferred to use Notifier for its namesake purpose: It “notified” me of news like friends’ status updates, new messages (tweets) on Twitter and RSS news feeds.

Notifier costs $3 monthly and is exclusively available on roughly 30 AT&T (T) phones, 21 of which don’t have QWERTY keyboards. AT&T advises people who use it to do so with a data plan; these start at $15 monthly for unlimited data without text messaging. You must buy Notifier in AT&T’s online store, MEdia Mall.

Smart phones are flush with apps that aggregate content from several social networks into one spot, including Xumii for the BlackBerry or iPhone and a feature called Pulse in Yahoo’s (YHOO) oneConnect for the iPhone. There’s even a fun — though not too functional — iPhone app called Ziibii that floats social-network tidbits down an on-screen river.

Whether they’re on smart phones or basic cellphones, apps that display a lot of data in one condensed place need to do so clearly. Notifier does this by displaying a ribbon of icons at the top of the phone’s screen that it calls the carousel, and you can move the phone’s directional arrows left or right to switch from one program to the next. Whatever icon is highlighted in the carousel is the program that appears on the rest of the screen.

A tiny house icon represents the home screen, where three categories of boxes show quick snapshots of data: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.” The top box, labeled New, shows names of programs with numbers to show how many new items, or updates, were submitted to that program. For example, “Inbox: 3″ means that three new emails were received; “Feeds: 54″ represents 54 newly received snippets of news from an easy-to-use RSS reader built into Notifier.

Below this data are the My Update and My Stream sections, with left and right arrows to let you scan through various subcategories within each section. My Update shows your status on the various social networking sites.

I found My Stream to be a little confusing. It lets you arrow left or right to see what’s going on in your social network — if you received a new email, for instance, or someone sent you an instant message. But because you’re arrowing left or right, not up and down in a list, it’s hard to find the beginning of this stream. And Facebook notifications are a little too vague; one might say, “Barbie Roberts updated her Facebook profile,” without telling you what she did to update it.

Another Facebook glitch that I ran into was that I had to sign in more than once. This could be a hassle if you’re on the road and nowhere near a computer. In one instance, I was signed in and typed out a status update, but had to sign into Facebook yet again to post my new status. ISkoot says this and other Facebook navigation issues will be fixed within a week.

I flicked through My Stream while standing in line to board a plane and minimized the Notifier screen to get back to the phone’s functionality. Notifier can alert you of new messages even when it’s minimized. This works because the app stays connected to the network, so when you get a new message on Facebook, an email or an instant message, an indicator pops up asking if you’d like to open up the Notifier screen.

The trouble with this indicator is that it doesn’t specify what kind of message you received. I care a lot more about email and instant messages than I do about Facebook messages and would rather not be notified about Facebook. And messages received in the Facebook inbox won’t display in Notifier’s “New” inbox; instead users must take an extra step out to the browser. The company says it’s working on fixing this.

I liked the Notifier news feeds, which were easy to set up. A technology category offered content from 11 sources, and the entertainment category’s seven sources ranged from Rolling Stone to the Onion to Perez Hilton. These feeds are mixed into My Stream, like email or any other news from your network.

Instant messaging, however, required too many steps. It took a while for buddy lists to load. When I selected a person’s name to start an IM conversation, a white screen appeared that looked like a place where I could type my message, but I had to select a “Write” option to skip to another screen and start composing. Likewise, emails couldn’t be typed on the screen of the message itself; rather, you have to open a separate screen for text entry. You might get used to this after a while, but it felt clumsy to me.

Notifier’s extra $18 monthly cost (not including a voice plan) might be worthwhile if you just need a way to stay plugged in and notified of the latest goings-on with friends and email. And compared with the cost of a smart phone, it might be an economical alternative. But its awkward interface and poor placement on the cellphone leave a lot of room for improvement.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Bet you’re thinking about Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

I’m actually describing a Windows Mobile device. In fact, any touch-screen Windows Mobile device made in the past couple of years can perform the aforementioned functions — as long as it’s running a new application called Kinoma Play.

This much-needed shot in the arm for Windows Mobile comes from Kinoma Inc. and for $30 can be downloaded onto a computer or directly onto a device from www.kinoma.com. It works on touch and nontouch screens alike, though touch features do add a lot of pizzazz. After installation, Kinoma Play seems to totally take over the device’s multimedia functions, hiding every trace of Windows Mobile’s clunky, antiquated, menu-driven operating system.

Kinoma Play in action, clockwise from top left: a media interface, touch-screen navigation, upload to YouTube, picture rotation, search by characters, and photo zoom.

It smoothly opens and displays all types of media, including photos, videos and music. But it’s also a fast search engine for multimedia content on the phone, on the Web or even on your computer via remote search. Kinoma Play works with services including YouTube, Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, Orb and SHOUTcast. And a section called the Kinoma Guide compiles over 100,000 podcast episodes, radio stations, videos, live television and Webcam clips, panoramas and photos into easy-to-browse categories.

After almost a week with this application, I changed the way I thought about on-the-go Web browsing for media. I forgot about typical browser functions like typing a Web site’s name into a URL bar and instead did plenty of things online with my portable device without deliberately thinking about being online.

Kinoma Play is so well-designed that I wish it could entirely replace the dated Windows Mobile user interface, which still lags behind the iPhone’s. But, alas, it’s about media only. It isn’t designed to supplant, and doesn’t change or improve, any of the phone’s more common functions, like overall email and Web browsing, calendar, contacts or productivity programs.

Kinoma is working on Symbian, Linux and even iPhone versions of its application and will release one of those versions by the end of this year.

I ran into a few problems while using Kinoma Play. On three different occasions using two different devices, my touch screen froze when I tried to start the application, and the only way I could fix the problem was by completely rebooting my device. Once in a while, I experienced slow performance, though this could have been attributed to my network connection. And Kinoma Play lacks a one-step shortcut to its home screen; currently, users must press a “Back” soft key on each screen until they reach the home screen.

But the pluses of Kinoma Play outweighed these hassles, especially considering how enjoyable this application was to use. I tested Kinoma on two Palm (PALM) devices running Windows Mobile: the not-yet-released Treo Pro, which will be available here in the fall for an unlocked, unsubsidized price of $549, and the $250 (after discounts and two-year-contract rebates) Treo 800w available from Sprint (S). Both have touch screens that work best with an included stylus, though a fingernail or fingertip worked for me in most cases.

Upon installation, Kinoma Play automatically scans a device’s media and organizes it into categories under a section called My Media Files. I was especially eager to see how photos were handled, so I started out in the Pictures category.

All Kinoma screens have a set of familiar navigational tools that appear as soft keys at the bottom of the screen; they show up when the bottom section of the screen is touched and disappear when touched again. On the bottom left, a “Back” arrow takes users to the previous screen. On the bottom right, a list-like icon represents what Kinoma calls the Menu Pod. When touched, this pulls up three succinct menus — for media, settings and another action related to the program that’s open.

I opened some photos that were stored on the Palm Treo Pro and touched the center of the screen with my finger. A quick tap on the screen zooms in on each photo, and a small inset of the photo with a box representing the magnified area appears on the lower right of the screen. I dragged this tiny box around in the inset image to change where I was zooming. To zoom in on a photo slowly, I simply touched and held my finger on the screen for a longer period of time. A quick tap after either zooming method will quickly snap the image back to normal view.

I moved from one photo to the next as I do on my iPod Touch: by placing a finger on one edge of the photo and flicking left or right across the screen. Rotating was fun and easy to do when I drew a circle on the photo with my fingertip in the direction that I wanted it to rotate. The image followed whatever motion I drew. To rotate the photo 180 degrees, I drew a larger half-circle.

I selected Flickr from Kinoma Play’s list of services and signed into my Flickr account in just a few steps. My photos and those of friends were just as easy to browse as my own photos, thanks to Kinoma Play’s built-in tools. The Menu Pod icon offered a one-step way to play all photos in slide shows; music could be selected to play in the background.

With a touch on the Menu Pod icon, users can add any media to favorites or to an “on-the-go” list. This same tool also sends multimedia to others via email; I used it to send friends photos of a recent trip to California as well as a YouTube link to video footage of Sen. Joe Biden speaking.

Kinoma makes something out of every action. The Menu Pod button seems to jump into the center of the screen when summoned, and each of its three menus spins like a tiny top to get out of the way so another menu can be seen. Other screens seemed to do a mini back flip as they opened or closed. And long lists seemed to bounce when scrolling reached the top or bottom.

In the Services menu, I used Audible to listen to part of an audio book and listened to rock and country songs on Web radio stations from SHOUTcast and Live365.

I particularly liked using the Kinoma Guide, which is constantly updated with material that streams to your devices when you open it. I found a Restaurant Guys podcast in which chef Cat Cora was interviewed, and even saved it for later listening by downloading this seven-megabyte podcast to my device in one clean step. Kinoma wisely adds all downloads to a special section that’s easy to find. The last 100 things you looked at on Kinoma Play can be found in a section called History.

These days in the tech world, much attention is being paid to applications sold on Apple’s App Store for use with the iPhone or iPod Touch. But Kinoma Play is one application that is desperately needed by Windows Mobile users, and it just might remind them that they can better navigate media-related Web services — without having to buy a new mobile device.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find all our columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Like a beloved old car with faults that its owner no longer notices, Evite’s familiarity often masks its rough user interface. Its Web pages are littered with advertisements — many that are obnoxiously intrusive.

Social-networking users are irked that Evite doesn’t do enough to incorporate their favorite Web sites, leaving fans of MySpace.com and Facebook feeling like the Evite creation process is a bothersome step out of their online community of friends.

Still others complain that since it was launched in 1998, Evite hasn’t done enough to improve its user interface and hasn’t added many significant features that take advantage of so-called Web 2.0 technologies, which allow publishers to integrate more functions onto one Web page rather than forcing users to refresh or change pages to accomplish tasks.

This week, I tested MyPunchbowl.com (www.mypunchbowl.com) by Punchbowl Software, a competitor to IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s Evite (www.evite.com). Both programs are free. Though MyPunchbowl was introduced only in January, it has a clean interface with fewer ads than Evite; in fact, MyPunchbowl invitees never see ads. It doesn’t integrate with social-networking sites such as MySpace.com, Friendster or Facebook, but it does use message boards, as well as photo and video sharing through Flickr.com and YouTube.com, respectively.

MyPunchbowl is taking on the more-established Evite site

MyPunchbowl isn’t perfect: its invitation preview button is buried, leaving the host wondering what exactly will be sent out to the guest. Its templates are limited to around 100, according to the company, while Evite’s templates total roughly 800. But all in all, MyPunchbowl offers a good mix of just enough and not too many features. It is approachable for the tech-savvy and nontechies alike.

Sensing competition from MyPunchbowl, Socializr (an Evite meets social-networking application founded by the maker of Friendster) and others, Evite.com has stepped up its game. Hotel suggestions can now be made in a Hotels.com section on invitations, and photos can be uploaded for post-party sharing. In August Evite plans to introduce an online party-supply store, and in October it will offer a mobile component. The company is even testing new, animated versions of its invitations.

I first played around with Evite to refresh my memory. I focused on its real purpose — creating an invitation. This process is started by choosing a theme, like “BBQ,” then picking a design to go with your theme. A host must then add details about the event for guests, and then enter guests’ emails. I found a BBQ invitation design in the new animated style, but couldn’t figure out how to see what its animation looked like before I sent it, which was frustrating. When I brought this to Evite’s attention, it acknowledged the bug. Hosts can easily see previews of regular invitations as well as the exact email that the guest will receive.

Evite allows for personalization in its Reply Style section. This section lets the host create party-related categories for responses rather than just yes, no and maybe. An invitation for a night of card-playing might, for example, categorize the yes responses as “I’m All In.” Evite responses are a big reason people like using it, as it lets all guests see who is coming and what they said in their response.

The party-planning section in Evite was introduced in the past year. It includes some useful tools, such as a drink calculator (to estimate how much alcohol you’ll need for an event), a party checklist and event-planning ideas. I used one tool called the party budget estimator to see if it guessed the right amount spent on a bridal shower I co-hosted, and it was pretty accurate.

MyPunchbowl.com tries to distinguish itself by offering start-to-finish steps for the event’s host. This procedure begins with Pick a Date, so that you can offer guests a few potential suggestions to see which one they’d prefer. Guests can be distinguished as VIPs, helping you give their vote more merit, and you can tell guests the date you prefer. Once a date is chosen, a Save the Date email is sent out, with a message board on which guests can start chatting about the event. The full invitation follows this, followed by the After Party message board on which photos and videos can be shared via Flickr.com and YouTube.

Evite also offers to send out Save the Date cards before an event, and it incorporates Pick a Date options in the actual invitation itself.

I got started on MyPunchbowl without signing up for an account, which was a treat. I got halfway through the invitation creation process before deciding I liked it enough to sign up. I started an account by opening a small window in my current screen, entering my name, email and password and continued making the invitation right where I left off.

One glaring problem with MyPunchbowl was that I couldn’t figure out how to preview my invitation before I sent it to guests. I ended up crossing my fingers and sending the invitation out anyway. Later, someone from the company showed me an obscure preview link on the bottom left side of a page, but this didn’t cut it. MyPunchbowl says it knows this is a big problem, and that it intends to fix this and other problems in the next few months.

I also noted that the text box where I typed a message to guests didn’t offer various fonts or colors, nor did it offer to spell-check my message; Evite offers all of these things. And responses on MyPunchbowl’s invitations are limited to yes, no or remind me later. If guests want to respond in more detail, they are directed to a message board. Evite users may not adapt to the message-board method.

I was able to instantly add a Google map to the MyPunchbowl invitation at the press of a button, which is helpful. MyPunchbowl also gives users a chance to more tightly control guest responses, such as requesting that guests respond a certain number of days prior to the party.

Change and variety are welcome for electronic invitations. After all, it makes sense that a hip host would want to be on the cutting edge, starting with the invitation. MyPunchbowl requires a bit of a learning curve and doesn’t have as many extra features as Evite. For people who might not understand the idea of MyPunchbowl’s message boards, Evite will remain the favorite. But the younger competitor’s cleaner interface coupled with its plans for improvements this summer might make it an appealing option for planning your next get-together.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com