Palm Treo

The Palm Treo  series of PDAs and Smartphones has proved more versatile than many of its competitors. Anticipation is strong for Palm's next series of Treo devices and important tech blogs like Engadget are buzzing with news.

Operating System

The Treo 650  and 700p  use the PalmOS.  This is what you want.

The Treo 700w  uses Windows Mobile. Reviews have not been great. Consider a Blackberry  if you want good Windows and Microsoft Exchange integration.

Syncing

The Treo, like all PalmOS devices, comes with software that allows it to sync with several desktop PIM options, including Outlook  (PC), Entourage  (Mac), and MacOS X's native event/task/contact managers.

Syncing is accomplished using a framework of "sync conduits", plugins for each application on the Palm which knows how to deal with the data for that application. If you install a new application on your Palm and it gets data from the net or from your desktop, it has to install a new conduit to handle the transfer. PalmOS devices ship with the conduits to manage all the data for the traditional PIM suite -- events, tasks, contacts, memos -- as well as for backing up your Treo's data, and for installing new multimedia files into the Treo's memory or into its external memory card.

Mac OS

The software that ships with the Palm for MacOS is the venerable Palm Desktop.  While this is a fine PIM suite, it essentially hasn't seen a feature update in 10 years, and is a little behind the times when dealing with data from multiple sources, which many people with a Palm have, at least one machine at work and one at home. If you use the Palm Desktop, you can use the Palm as the go-between to update both desktops, but many Mac users are already fond of the built-in sync-everywhere nature of using iCal, Address Book, and iSync, with Apple's .mac online service.

MacOS now ships with an iSync conduit for the Palm, allowing Mac users to use the native apps they've been using all along to handle their PIM data, benefitting from all its mac-y goodness, and still sync with the Palm. The trouble is there are several missing links.  Firstly, there is no corresponding Mac application for the Palm's memos, so you have to open the Palm Desktop app just to view, create, or edit the Memos from your Mac. Secondly, Palm categories are not supported, even though they could be.  PalmOS has categories to file every bit of data under ("Business" contacts, "Personal" appointments, "Family" memos, "User Group" tasks, etc); while MacOS apps don't have categories per se,  iCal can support multple calendars, and AddressBook can assign contacts to groups, meaning that each  calendar or group could be mapped to a category on the Palm, but they just aren't.

Better Mac Syncing Software

The Missing Sync  currently costs $40; If it's worth $500 to get yourself a Treo, then it's definitely worth it to get this package. It does everything you'd expect it to.

It turns events and tasks in the iCal calendar into events and tasks on your Treo with a similarly named category, and does the same with Address Book contact.  It includes a stand-alone Memo application.

In addition to getting sync right, it also adds many data management features. For starters, it allows you to mount the memory card in the Treo on your desktop like a drive right throught the USB sync cable so that you don't need a card reader everywhere you go.

Furthermore, it brings a whole new list of value-adding sync features that handle tasks most people must perform manually. It automatically imports photos you've taken on your camera into iPhoto whenever you sync, and remembers which files it's already imported. It can also sync selected iPhoto albums to your handheld (think "wallet photos") ... it also syncs all of your contact info to the Treo, unlike the Palm Conduit, which only syncs one of the addresses you have for a contact and doesn't sync birthdays, contact photos, categories or AIM names.

A full feature list is available here.

It's a complete cinch to set up and there's no trouble changing over from the Palm Hotsync  to this software.