Outlook or Palm Desktop?

April 21, 2005 11:10 AM

A Palm Tungsten C and Windows XP. With which should I sync: Outlook, Palm Desktop, or something else?
posted by tranquileye to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: While I like Outlook's datebook/to-do list features more than Palm Desktop's, I use Palm Desktop. I use Thunderbird as my email client and Outlook tries a little too hard to reassert itself as the main email client when I used to use it just for the other features.

But Palm Desktop is nicer in some respects -- it syncs a couple of things Outlook doesn't have the functionality for, like pictures, voice memos, and Documents-to-Go documents.
posted by ontic at 11:31 AM on April 21, 2005

Not free (you didn't say), but you could try Now Up-to-Date & Contact. It has the added benefit of being cross platform should you change your mind about your computer and doing group scheduling and address book sharing.
posted by cptnrandy at 12:29 PM on April 21, 2005

Outlook annoys the hell out of me. Palm Desktop is very simple and clean. Well, it was until recently. It's still better than Outlook.
posted by grouse at 12:37 PM on April 21, 2005

Unless you are using Outlook/Exchange, go with Palm Desktop.
posted by kc0dxh at 1:00 PM on April 21, 2005

I had nothing but problems syncing Outlook 2003 to my Palm Zire 72. Palm has a bunch of fixes for it, but they still didn't work. I ended up with Chapura's PocketMirror XT.
posted by tommasz at 3:33 PM on April 21, 2005

If you use 3d party apps, I recommend getting BackupBuddy or something like it to back up everything. It makes recovery from total power loss (it's happened) or total Palm loss (it's happened) much less painful.

If you never use anything but the apps it came with, you don't really need it, though.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 8:54 PM on April 21, 2005

OK, BackupBuddy. I've never understood it. Doesn't HotSync Manager create full backups of all your Palm datbase files, including the non-builtin apps? Actually I know it does, since I have fully restored my Palm and/or shifted to a new Palm multiple times.

So why would I need to buy BackupBuddy?
posted by grouse at 12:30 AM on April 22, 2005

Hunh. It looks like things have changed somewhere across the past several years, and there's much less point to BackupBuddy than there used to be.

Near as I can tell at a quick glance, Hotsync Manager still doesn't make a copy of every file, like BackupBuddy does, but it does synchronize the data of apps whose backup bit is on (this can be seen in the Filez app, for instance.) And that seems to be the default.

So, never mind me; what grouse said.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 2:52 PM on April 22, 2005