Windows Phone Thoughts: Sync Different: PocketMac Pro 3.0 Reviewed

Personal Information Management
The most important feature of a Pocket PC for many people is Personal Information Management, the mix of your calendar, contacts, tasks and notes. For me, integration of my Pocket PC with my PIM-program of choice on the desktop is very important. This was the main reason why I replaced my dayplanner with a Pocket PC.

Mac OS X comes with some pretty cool PIM apps (iCal, Address, Mail), but still I use Microsoft Entourage for all my PIM activities. It has some strange notions (like the inability to create PIM database containers as a backup, such as Outlook .pst files), but I keep returning to Entourage because I'm used to having all my PIM info integrated in one program. So you can imagine that I was very happy to learn that PocketMac Pro 3.0 supports Entourage synchronization.


Figure 3: In the preference pane you get to select the program you want to sync with, and select the range of "old" information you want to sync. Click on the image to view it in its original size.

All my information synchronized without any hiccups. My only complaint is that the first synchronization was a little slow compared to the speed of an initial Activesync on my Windows desktop. Subsequent syncs of my PIM info were a lot faster though, so this shouldn't be too much of a nuisance.

Music and Photos, your iMedia
PocketMac Pro 3.0 enables you to synchronize music and photos to your Pocket PC as well. And this is one point where you can do more with your Mac sync tool than with Activesync: you get to select a storage card to synchronize to! Especially for those big media files, this is a huge plus!


Figure 4: You get to choose what to sync, where to sync it to, and for photos if you want to resize your mobile photos. Click on the image to view it in its original size.

In iPhoto and iTunes PocketMac Pro 3.0 creates an Album and a Playlist. You setup the items you want to sync by dragging them to these collections. For your music you'll be asked if you want to copy over "large files", and if you agree they'll be copied over.


Figure 5: Copying your music to your Pocket PC. Click on the image to view it in its original size.

As far as I can see, this isn't done overly well. Considering that each time I synchronized, the same files would be copied over, even if they already existed in the target folder on the Pocket PC. Since file synchronization is pretty slow (more on that later), this can be quite a nuisance. Especially since the question of whether I really wanted to sync those large files over kept popping up, waiting for me to click a button. In the end I just copied over my music manually.

For your photos, if you have selected to resize the mobile version of your images, they'll be automatically resized. On my Pocket PC (a Compaq iPAQ 3870) they ended up a little smaller than full screen. I would have preferred a 320x240 size, or the option of specifying the size of the mobile version of the images.