I've been trying to get my palm to sync nicely with web calendars (google calendar), task lists (remember the milk), contacts (plaxo) etc. And you know what? Nothing actually truly works.

There are many things that will let you sync outlook to the outside world. Some are listed below. Regardless, I tried syncing palm to outlook a few years ago and HATED it. It mangled all my data and sucked. I don't use outlook anyway. I hate it. Why should I?

Not many things let you sync palm desktop or palm pilots (directly) to the outside world. There's Airset, Calgoo, goosync, companionlink software.. I tried them all.

Airset.com can get info from google calendar to airset, but not the other way around. It takes ages to set up different groups for different calendar categories only to find that google calendar will never see the contents. Useless! Fine if I wanted to just use Airset.

Calgoo just lets you see all your various calendars in their software and never the twain shall meet. Not good enough!

Goosync is expensive, involves paying for a subscription (to get all the good features) and buying a third party app to allow your palm to actually sync. Why they can't just sync to palm desktop is beyond me. Okay for phone sync apparently, though. I nearly got the subscription until I realised that you can see all your google calendars in your palm after syncing... but you can't see all your palm categories separately in google calendar. They just get mushed up into one. Google has to have the original calendars and your handset mirrors them. In the end, not much better than airset.

Companionlink is the app suggested by palm and google. But that just mashes all your categories into one also. And it costs. And it won't run without installing extra windows components and that pissed me off.

Gcalsync is opensource and looks good, but is for phones I don't have (not palms) and probably mashes all the data together too.

NOTHING does a task sync from palm desktop to web.

There are heaps of people online asking for palm-google calendar syncs, contact syncs and task syncs.

Palm should create a web based palm desktop for starters. Heaps of people would just use that and get it to sync back to their desktop at regular intervals. But if Palm themselves don't start reliably managing syncing between their stuff and the web apps people want to use.. then they are doomed. People just won't use their stuff. I don't think they're even trying to help users.

All I use my palm for is contacts, calendar and tasks. It takes up a lot of space in my bag. I'm going to just use web apps with sms reminders and see how it goes. When I finally get a Mac I'll use http://spanningsync.com/ to sync my calendar to my mac and ipod. When I get a better phone I'll sync to that and use WAP to do anything that won't sync.

Labels: geeky

Posted at 6:17 AM #

Comments:

I was in your boat - and while I love my Palm TX it's not the necessity it once was.

I managed to get around your issues by using plaxo.

Plaxo syncs my work outlook calender, yahoo calender, google calender, and home outlook calender with it's web interface and all of the information is identical across the board.

It does the same for contacts, and tasks also.

Since it all syncs to my home outlook calender I just sync my palm to that and now my online and offline world are in sync.

For when your on the go plaxo even has a mobile web interface you can bring up on your palm.


Ok I'll stop sounding like a plaxo shill now.

# posted by  creeva : 6:04 PM

 

View Comments »

End of Palm?

I've been trying to get my palm to sync nicely with web calendars (google calendar), task lists (remember the milk), contacts (plaxo) etc. And you know what? Nothing actually truly works.

There are many things that will let you sync outlook to the outside world. Some are listed below. Regardless, I tried syncing palm to outlook a few years ago and HATED it. It mangled all my data and sucked. I don't use outlook anyway. I hate it. Why should I?

Not many things let you sync palm desktop or palm pilots (directly) to the outside world. There's Airset, Calgoo, goosync, companionlink software.. I tried them all.

Airset.com can get info from google calendar to airset, but not the other way around. It takes ages to set up different groups for different calendar categories only to find that google calendar will never see the contents. Useless! Fine if I wanted to just use Airset.

Calgoo just lets you see all your various calendars in their software and never the twain shall meet. Not good enough!

Goosync is expensive, involves paying for a subscription (to get all the good features) and buying a third party app to allow your palm to actually sync. Why they can't just sync to palm desktop is beyond me. Okay for phone sync apparently, though. I nearly got the subscription until I realised that you can see all your google calendars in your palm after syncing... but you can't see all your palm categories separately in google calendar. They just get mushed up into one. Google has to have the original calendars and your handset mirrors them. In the end, not much better than airset.

Companionlink is the app suggested by palm and google. But that just mashes all your categories into one also. And it costs. And it won't run without installing extra windows components and that pissed me off.

Gcalsync is opensource and looks good, but is for phones I don't have (not palms) and probably mashes all the data together too.

NOTHING does a task sync from palm desktop to web.

There are heaps of people online asking for palm-google calendar syncs, contact syncs and task syncs.

Palm should create a web based palm desktop for starters. Heaps of people would just use that and get it to sync back to their desktop at regular intervals. But if Palm themselves don't start reliably managing syncing between their stuff and the web apps people want to use.. then they are doomed. People just won't use their stuff. I don't think they're even trying to help users.

All I use my palm for is contacts, calendar and tasks. It takes up a lot of space in my bag. I'm going to just use web apps with sms reminders and see how it goes. When I finally get a Mac I'll use http://spanningsync.com/ to sync my calendar to my mac and ipod. When I get a better phone I'll sync to that and use WAP to do anything that won't sync.

Labels: geeky