Re: Migrating away from Palm desktop

In message <1ojpi4ha18rmfu4r9bjr9jd0jr1kc5cn9a@xxxxxxx> Zombie Elvis
<DELETEMETOREPLYrobertocastillo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> was claimed to have
wrote:

On Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:03:44 -0800, DevilsPGD
<spam_narf_spam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Android is open enough that you can download apps without going
through Google's app store. Also the user and developer communities
that are growing up around Android remind me a lot of the old PalmOS
community.

I have hope for the community, but from what I've seen so far if you
already run your life through Google, the G1 probably isn't for you.

Some people might say the same thing about Apple and your iPhone.

Yes and no -- You need to get apps through Apple, but you aren't
otherwise tied to Apple for anything, and not even that much if you
jailbreak.

The calendar and contacts features work and sync without Apple. Email
connects directly from the device to the mail server, and the built-in
client supports non-Apple provided accounts.

Now I should comment that I haven't seen or touched the OS at all and am
going solely based on what I've read, but from the looks of it, the
device just doesn't always play nice if you don't plan on using Gmail,
Google Calendar, etc and instead want to synchronize against something
entirely different.

Well the phone itself is tied to your Gmail account whether you have
one or not and you do have to set one up in order to start using the
phone. Having said that, you can still set up a separate non-Gmail
e-mail account and use it with a separate client.

That "separate client" is part of the problem. Having used third party
PIMs that don't use the native PIM database on PDAs before, it's usually
at best frustrating. Everything works great in the PIM software, but
when you're using an external app (Google Maps?) and want to look up a
contact, it uses the device native PIM. When you want to send an email
from Google's browser, will it assume Gmail, or use your third party
app?

I just bought a G1 and am playing with it right now. I'll probably say
more once I've had more time with it.

I'd definitely love to hear more.

For me, the lack of a SyncML client is a deal breaker.

I used Goosync, which uses SyncML to synchronize my Treo's calendar to
Google Calendar and the G1 synced that information when I set it up.

Right -- Again, through Google. I don't use Google's Calendar or
Contacts and don't particularly want to add that complexity just to sync
my data from my existing SyncML server -- Sure, I could find some
desktop Calendar and sync it with SyncML to both my primary server and
GooSync at the same time, assuming GooSync doesn't abuse my Google login
information and assuming they stay free, both big assumptions, but
that's a *huge* number of additional steps.

It's nice to have more competition in the PDA and phone market
especially now that Palm has declared their lack of intention to
compete, but I'm a little disappointed that Google couldn't do better.
.

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