On Dec 17, 2007, at 10:48 AM, revDAVE wrote:
I am looking for suggestions of cell phones that sync well with Mac /
entourage 2004. Main concern is address book and then emails if
possible...
- Palm - Treo?
- BlackBerry?
- iPhone?
I want an iPhone, but not the current model. The problem is the AT&T
EDGE network. I'm hoping to see a new iPhone on AT&T 3G network early
in 2007. And more RAM in the iPhone would be good. And I would like a
data link to my laptop, too, without buying a separate EVDO Express
Card and paying for a redundant data account.
That said, I used a Palm Treo 650 for several years until it was
stolen in Houston over Thanksgiving. Oh yeah, they got my MacBook Pro
17" too.
Palm is very capable, with third party software. Mine had TomTom
Navigator, DataViz Documents to Go Pro (MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint,
and PDF), plus DataViz Passwords Plus. I used Missing Sync. The whole
Palm conduit thing was always opaque to me, a hassle.
I am a systems administrator, with multiple Xserves and tons of
passwords. It was great to have synchonized copies of my all my
passwords on both laptop and Palm. That is, it was great until the day
my Treo and my laptop got stolen at the same time. Then it became a
horror story, which continues today almost a month later. DataViz no
longer supports Passwords Plus, not even paid. I've got backups, but
their knowledge base is empty on any kind of restore, other than a
tedious manual backup system done inside the software itself. Too late
for that. Beware of companies that sell products to protect against
catastrophic loss (my passwords are safely encrypted) and then abandon
their users in their hour of need.
Documents To Go is a good product, but unfortunately, my attitude
towards DataViz has reached the point that I am about to get our
corporate attorney involved.
iPhone is not available for corporate accounts. Maybe next year. For
now, it is a consumer only product that must be billed to your
personal credit card.
I replaced the Palm Treo with a Blackberry Curve. It beats the Palm in
many ways, but not in others. to be fair, I've only had it a few
weeks. It has built-in GPS navigation that is accomplished via a data
connection, not internal maps like TomTom for Palm. Frankly, TomTom
was far superior, though a lot more pain to install. The Blackberry OS
beats Palm, as does the beautiful color screen. and the phone is
lighter and more compact. the speaker phone on the Blackberry is much
better than on the Treo 650.
Palm Treo with Missing Sync will connect to your desktop or laptop
wirelessly via Bluetooth. Blackberry is synced via USB only, but
Blackberry is doing right by Mac owners by licensing the leading 3rd
party Mac software and providing it free. Password management software
is included, but not promoted. I don't like the design and capability
as well as Passwords Plus, and it would be vulnerable to the same loss
I just suffered with Passwords Plus.
I'm not doing mobile e-mail. Just too much overhead to do all this
murderous configuration, and I get too many messages. It would be
torture.
My new laptop is in, and I am experimenting with Apple Mail.app
configured as IMAP, at least until Microsoft releases Office 2008. I
have been a hard core Entourage user for years, but loss of my POP3 e-
mail and over 100 mail rules is killing me. My new MacBook Pro has 4GB
RAM and is dramatically faster than the old one, which was only months
old with 2GB RAM. I partly attribute speed problems with the old
machine to Entourage. I suffered greatly with notorious Entourage
stalls. It never crashed, but Entourage would simply go on break for 2
to 5 minutes, as if it had locked up. I'm not going to tolerate that
any more.
Adjusting to IMAP is a struggle. I don't understand it fully, and it
complicates my interaction with 15 different e-mail accounts, about
100 mail rules, and myriad folders that on Entourage held 20,000
messages or more.
I want an iPhone. Forget Passwords Plus. I will get an SSL cert for my
Panorama Enterprise database, and securely access my passwords through
the iPhone web browser. I will never expose myself to the potential
for password loss ever again.
BTW - the web browser on the Blackberry Curve stinks. It is useful for
looking at sites optimized for mobile devices, and little else. Even
so, it is better than the Treo 650, at least to the extent mine was
incorrectly provisioned. When I bought the Treo, I told every Cingular
rep I wanted unlimited data. Salesmen fought me trying not to include
data, but I insisted. I suspect Cingular (since sold to AT&T) was
having a promotion with a sales incentive on a plan that did not
include data. At any rate, I used the Treo browser one time in Georgia
to retrieve local travel info, and Cingular hit me with a $100
surcharge on my bill. I don't have time to do war with telcos, so I
simply never used the web browser ever again. Beaten by my own
technology.
If Apple does one thing right with the iPhone, it will be to take cell
phone configuration and provisioning out of the hands of telcos. The
telcos are in Detroit mode, treating their customers like a foie gras
goose in a cage. Great strategy for short term exorbitant profits on
incremental, trivial services. For 100 years, that's been the telco
game. Flash back to Detroit in 1970: "If we make the door handles out
of cheap pot metal, it will increate profits 200%. Better yet - they
are a dealer part and customers will have to buy replacements from
us!" I'm straying way off topic on Net Neutrality here, but let's all
hope these days are over for the telco thieves same as they came to an
end in Detroit.
Danny Grizzle
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