Re: Palm Treo 640 and OSX ?

David Cleland <davidjcleland@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

does anyone know if the palm treo sync with osx and to what extent ? I
am very tempted - anyone got one ?

Ah, that'll be my area of expertise then.

I suspect you mean the Treo 650, not 640, right? There is no 640. The
650 is just a Palm organiser, so it will sync exactly the same as any
other Palm.

You have three options; stick to the Palm method, use iSync, or purchase
The Missing Sync.

The Palm method:
This just involves chucking the CD that comes with the Treo into your
Mac and installing. All changes will be synced to Palm Desktop
application, and NOT to the various OSX apps (Address Book, iCal, etc).
Some of the fields in Palm Desktop don't match the fields in the Treo
(historical reasons) but most of it works OK. Syncing is reliable. The
Palm databases are *NOT* backed up so if you wipe/lose your Treo you
will have to rely on the sync from Palm Desktop; given the mismatch of
fields, the sync might not work as expected. You can download other
tools to back up the Palm databases; the Palm tools will back up most of
the other stuff on the Palm well enough to do a decent (but not entirely
thorough) restore.

Use iSync:
This will sync the Treo to Address Book and iCal's calendar and task
list. I have done this once, a long while ago, so things may have
changed. It screwed nearly everything up and I was very pissed off. It
didn't preserve categories (ie everything ended up in once category
after syncing), and I had a few other issues I can't recall. However,
other people seem to get on with it fine; I guess it depends on your
needs, eg whether you have private records, repeating tasks, etc etc.

The Missing Sync:
Google will find this. It costs about twenty quid, and officially
there's no demo version (though I found a sneaky way to download a 14
day trial). It syncs the Treo to Address Book and iCal's calendar and
task list, as well as syncing memos to its own OSX app. It works, but is
a little buggy. The bugs affect me, they may not be a problem to you;
for instance the memo sync loses all categories and has once or twice
lost all data (!) but that was a previous version. The task list sync
loses the privacy flag on all tasks. Back up your data before using
this, just to be safe! On the plus side, it will back up all data on the
Treo (so a restore is quick and painless if you lose/wipe it), you can
sync over Bluetooth, you can choose sync profiles (eg just sync calendar
and do a backup when on Bluetooth), it preserves categories for Address
Book, Tasks and Events (and for Memos except it seems buggy). Although I
haven't tried these fully, it also syncs iPhoto and iTunes. It will
allow you to mount the card in the SD slot on your Mac desktop. It can
pop up reminders to tell you that you haven't synced recently.

The information above will most likely also apply to the Treo 700p as
well, but not the 700w (which runs Windows).


Personally, I use Missing Sync, but I have turned off Task / Memo
syncing because of the bugs. They will get turned back on once a fix
comes out. There's a mailing list which gives the impression that
they're good at addressing the bugs, so we'll see. Tasks and Memos are
still backed up, I just can't edit them on my Mac.

Hope this helps!

-zoara-



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