Windows Phone Thoughts: Mac Users, Free Yourself from Palm with PocketMac Pro 3.0

Contacts
Contacts can be synced from the Pocket PC to a variety of Mac programs, including Apple’s Address Book, Microsoft Entourage, and NowContacts. I have not tried using PocketMac to synchronize NowContacts since I do not own this program. However, PocketMac synced well with the other programs. It also did a good job synchronizing contacts within categories.


Figure 5: Annoying Confirmation Box Pops Up During Sync.

There’s one annoying thing about the synchronization, which also applies to calendar synchronization. If you remove any entries on the Pocket PC and then sync, you have to face this dialog box that asks whether you’re sure you want to remove the entry from Apple’s Address Book. It would be nice if PocketMac silently handled the synchronization and quietly alerted you at the end.

Calendars


Figure 6: Calendar Preference Pane.

I was thoroughly impressed by the Calendar synchronization of PocketMac. Again, you can choose to synchronize between Microsoft Entourage or Apple’s iCal calendar program. Also, like every other synchronization program, you can set a limit on what dates to synchronize.


Figure 7: iCal After Sync. Unfiled Events go in “PocketMac” Calendar.

The calendar synchronization program was utterly amazing. PocketMac quickly plowed through my calendars and synced them together very quickly. I use Pocket Informant to set categories for my appointments. PocketMac treats the categories as separate calendars in iCal.

Tasks & Email


Figure 8: Tasks Preference Pane.

PocketMac’s task synchronization needs some work. Generally when I mark a task as complete, I expect it to be hidden but easily retrievable at a later time. PocketMac, however, kept trying to remove completed tasks from iCal. I never found a workaround and eventually turned off the tasks feature as a result. Hopefully a later version will address this issue.

Email synchronization also doesn’t work very well. I tried syncing my Mail.app email to my Pocket PC using PocketMac. During the first sync, my email copied over quite nicely. On the second sync, PocketMac duplicated all of email in my Inbox. Instead of a synchronized inbox, I just ended up with multiple copies of the same message.