Microsoft Office Corporate:
Microsoft provides a solid way to tie together your digital life. Entourage Mail, with a calendar, contacts and notes synchronized to your PDA. Word, Excel and PowerPoint for taking care of business. Browse with Explorer and you’ve got all the bases covered. Ignore the shortcomings of the individual programs and just go with the complete package. But, start to mix and match and you end up with two email programs, two calendars or multiple address books because it’s an integrated package. When I used Entourage X, there was no Palm conduit from Microsoft, so I kept the calendar blank, rather than trying to keep it synchronized with my Palm Desktop calendar and ended up maintaining two contact databases.
Palm Minimalist:
You rely on your Palm and you like the Palm Desktop just fine. Team it with Eudora for your mail because you’ve used it for years. AppleWorks gets the job done for your office needs. Just browse with the latest build of Chimera and you’re set.
Apple Nirvana:
One address book for everything, one touch synchronization for all your digital devices. Bluetooth connectivity for your phone. All your music, calendar and contacts on your iPod. Digital still and video camera connectivity, integrated internet storage and mail. You’ve bought into the Apple package, but it’s not quite ready yet. iSync is still in beta and to-do lists are not yet implemented for Palm synchronization. There appears to be no solution for notes on the Palm and no connectivity for PocketPC. Palm connectivity still uses the HotSync manager. Just wait for a functional version of Open Office to replace AppleWorks and browse with OmniWeb.
I am currently working with the ragged version of Nerve-ana and iSync takes a LONG time to synchronize my Palm, iPod and two Macs via .mac. Conflicts arise, when I’ve changed nothing on any device. There are real advantages however. An address book that is safely backed up to my iDisk and Synchronized via .mac to a second computer. No more multiple address book hassles and my fax and speed dialer both tie into the database. Shared calendars implemented seamlessly and synchronized with that second computer. I can view my friends and co-workers calendars at a glance. I can publish a public calendar and even those without .mac can view it on the Web.
What’s needed:
To-do list synchronization with Palm. Some version of iNotes or a third party notepad with a Palm conduit. Direct connection to Palm and PocketPC devices. An Apple integrated browser based on Mozilla. Synchronization of external firewire drives and networked computers. The functionality of Apple’s backup program built into iSync. Show the appointment times in the month view of iCal and one last thing, dotmac is overpriced at $100, no matter what kind of spin Apple tries to put on the dismal conversion rate at the current discount of $50.
