That Syncing Feeling
September 19th, 2006It’s all very well having a super PDA/phone/organiser/Teasmade full of contacts and appointments, but why is it always such a pain in the arse to share that information with another computer, let alone between handheld devices? In addition to getting the right connection cable (or in my case bluetooth adapter for the PC) and proprietary transfer software, you almost always need a copy of Outlook to handle the data transfer – which then acts as a hub for syncronisation to other PDAs. Outlook Express came free with my PC. Does it support syncronisation? No! The full version is required…
It used to be so much easier when I had a Mac. Using the free Claris organiser and its XTND translators I could sync and transfer data in any direction to any format you could imagine including my Palm and Newton devices. This was ten years ago, and I still haven’t got back to that level of control on the PC, although SyncML seems to be a good candidate, if only all the device manufacturers would support it.
Although still quite dependent on Outlook, the writer of this Engtech article has a similar setup to me, and explains how to get all your devices on the same page, relatively smoothly.