[kennedy]

What features do you lose when moving from Palm Desktop to Address Book?

It appears you lose categories!! Or am I missing them somewhere?
What else?

What features of the mobile Palm address book are not supported by iSync+AddressBook?

It appears the custom fields will not be supported. What else?


I've just done my first iSync over to the OS X apps, and I am a bit disappointed at all the stuff that didn't seem to make it across... and that I seem to have lost the ability to return to Palm Desktop.

[PubGuy]

Yes, there are no "Categories" in AddressBook, it uses the groups instead like the other iApps. The bummer for me was that would have been nice to automatically create the "groups" based on my categories. I had to manually reset each of the addresses to after creating the groups -- gave me a chance to clean out some old address.

The big thing lacking in Address book is any way to determine which entries are not assigned to any group (i.e. the "Not Assigned" feature of Palm Desktop). These are inconviences, but they are outwayed for the ability to have a system-wide address book that integrates with my other apps.

As for getting back to Palm Desktop, yes you can do that. Goto /Library/Application Support/Palm Hotsync. The folder "Conduits" contain your currently active conduits. The "Disabled Conduits" contain all other ones. Move the "Apple" one in "Conduits" over to "Disabled Conduits". The move your Address, Datebook, ToDo and Memo into the "Conduits" folder.

Next, open up the Palm Hotsync Manager. Goto the HotSync menu and select "Conduit Settings..." . Confirm the settings are as you expected. To be safe, you may want to force a one-way sync from Palm Desktop back to your device.

That should do it for you.

[kennedy]

Thanks. I've returned to Palm Desktop. Apple really needs to look at Categories... to me, my volume is unmanageable without that... not syncing categories is unbearable. If they want to call them groups... fine... but they have to sync to each other.

Given my current cell phone is not supported by iSync and my next phone is going to be a Palm (probably Treo 600)... its not clear to me I will get any value from iSync/AddressBook. What will I be missing out on?

Unless there's some big wins there, I think I'll stick with the superior Palm Desktop at least until Panther... and maybe with it Address Book and iCal will be caught up with Palm Desktop... or maybe even surpass them.

But I have a feeling I may not be aware of some system niceties of the Apple apps that I should be considering. Please, convince me!