David Kreps Blog

Sync Hell

I am finally defeated. I have tried to make a PC at University, a Windows Mobile 5 phone-pda, a home office desktop PC, and my MacBook Pro keep a synchronised calendar, for all the appointments and plans in the many walks of my life, each being a place where changes might be made. The synchonisation problems across these platforms seem insurmountable.

Missing Sync for Windows Mobile on the Mac plays at being Active Sync quite well, but changes events by one hour (yes I have installed the released patch but it made it worse!) Events are routinely duplicated during synchronisation, as if Entourage simply cannot see the exact same event on the PDA, although the PDA happily writes the details into Entourage. Delete the duplicate and it will be removed by Windows XP when the PDA synchronises with the Desktop. [And yes I've exported the lot out of Outlook as a CSV, reimported it into Outlook, and then synchronised that across to empty WinMobile PDA and from there into empty Entourage. It still fucks up.]

I am so fed up with spending up to an hour a day pissing about trying to keep my calendar in order, when the synchronisation is supposed to make my life easier, not more complex. Keeping one calendar, say on my PDA, is not good enough because the PDA is a poorer interface than a full screen where I can plan more effectively.

Unfortunately, the present solution is to stop using Entourage, and launch Parallels on my Mac with Outlook installed on a Virtual WinXP, and use that to synchronise with my PDA. But do I then have to use Outlook on virtual PC on my Mac to hold all my contacts, email, etc etc. This is sad. It could be worse to being running both! The only other thing to do is to get an iPhone and begin to use iTunes on the PC. Try synchronising from that to Outlook! Maybe it will be better - on WinXP. Not sure to be honest.

When Orange offered me a £6.50 monthly deal worth £35 a month, with a free LG Viewty, it had to be better than £35 a month plus £270 outlay to have an iPhone on 02.

So for the next 18months I am still with Orange. So do I try an unlocked iPhone, with all the extra expenses that it may entail in decent patching software etc etc.... Doesn't seem like a reliable alternative to me.

Oh and as for getting the LG Viewty to talk to ANYTHING at all.... well forget it.

And yes of course I have tried to put the whole lot on Plaxo, and synchronise everything to that. THe LG Viewty couldn't talk to it at all. Entourage and Outlook and the PDA all managed to talk and sychronize with it and deleted more than half of all my calendar events in the process!!!! So I dumped out of Plaxo pronto, restored my calendars from backup (all important appointments with times and locations as well as dates) and thanked God for archiving.

Yep = go with one operating system and software company. that's the message. and because of that I really would rather go mac. but keeping the WM-PDA instead of going for the iPhone means, unfortunately, that MS have won. Outlook on parallels-virtual-winxp here I should go! But I tried it and it sucks.

Perhaps I just have to keep everything online - access it from the PDA over GPRS - and not use either Outlook OR Entourage. Perhaps this is the real change. Yep. This, though needing some research, is most likely the way forward.

 

 

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