[X4U] Palm vs. PocketPC

[Jim Robertson]

A few years ago, even BEFORE Palm stopped attending Macworld Expos, I gave
up on the platform after making NO headway for years when I'd complain about
the deficiencies in the basic bundled Palm applications. The most glaring of
these was in the Contacts database, which steadfastly refused to allow one
to enter separate work and home addresses for one's contacts. That was OK
when the basic Palm had something like 16 kilobytes of RAM, but as memory
became cheaper the deficiencies became more glaring.

I bought a PocketPC, struggled to make it work with Macs, and eventually
gave up on that as well, returning to writing notes on scraps of paper that
I lose. I now store names and phone numbers in my BlueTooth phone, but I'd
love an organizer that would sync to Entourage.

For some reason just today I visited the Palm website and discovered that
some time during my absence the company has realized that people do live and
work in different places, and that a handheld is a good place to store such
information about one's contacts.

I've been away from that platform for a few years, and I'm interested in
hearing opinions from people who use Palm devices. How good is
synchronization to the Mac? Can synchronization software remember
categories, multi-day events in the calendar, recurring events with custom
repeats (third Thursday of every month, last Friday of every month, etc.).
Does one need to purchase third party software to do the synchronizations?
Do the built-in sync services in Tiger serve any purpose when talking with
Palms?

Both PocketMac and the Missing Sync for Windows mobile seem to collapse at
the worst times trying to talk to Pocket PC devices. Besides, my iPAQ is too
big and bulky. Should I be looking again at a Palm device?

Thanks so much,

Jim Robertson
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