The Un-Switch1 April 2002 Tempted by visions of the forthcoming Sony Clié NR-70 and assertions that WordSmith really is better than Pocket Word, I tried to switch back to PalmOS for my "daily use" PDA. Here's why I ended up running back to the Pocket PC. It's all Sony's fault, really. It all started with all the preview articles of the new NR-70 I found on the web. The more I saw of Sony's new twist-screen beauty, the more I wanted one. And then, as begins so many of my other ill-fated misadventures, I started thinking. What, I wondered, would I really miss from my Pocket PC if I moved over to a slick multimedia PalmOS device like the Clié? I'd have WordSmith instead of Pocket Word. I'd have ShadowPlan instead of Pocket Mindmap. I use Palm Reader already for most of my ebook reading, and Palm Reader Pro for the Clié also supports sub-pixel font rendering at high resolution. I'd have DateBk4 instead of Agenda Fusion, and I could even emulate the file structure of the Pocket PC with Bachmann's FilePoint. Plus, I'd be able to use Quik Budget again. The only thing I'd really be missing was an email client that could sync with inbox subfolders in Outlook, but I thought I could work around that as well. I should note that the idea wasn't to switch permanently back to PalmOS. I wanted to be able to sync my Clié to the same data on my desktop as my Pocket PC synced to, then be able to switch back and forth at will. I'm starting a new business as a mobile computing consultant, and it's in my best interest to stay current in both platforms. I planned to use the Clié one week, then the Jornada the next, then the Clié again, etc. Since the application sets were comparable, I didn't think there would be a problem with this, as long as both devices synchronized with Outlook and Word. As a professional computer consultant, I should have realized how foolhardy the statement, "well, this shouldn't cause any problems" really is. The first thing I had to do was make sure HotSync Manager would co-exist peacefully on my USB port with ActiveSync. I still have a Clié PEG-N710C, the older and long (for Sony) discontinued model running PalmOS 3.51. Since true USB synchronization didn't appear in PalmOS (courtesy of Handspring) until PalmOS 4.0, my Clié requires Sony's "USB Switcher" application to intercept USB HotSync signals and redirect them to a virtual serial port that the serial-only HotSync Manager can understand. This is every bit as complicated as it sounds. The USB Switcher itself didn't seem to cause any problems, and even co-existed peacefully with ActiveSync, but about 50% of the time it didn't interact with the HotSync Manager either. I also noticed that I'd have to click on the HotSync Manager icon two or three times before the icon would actually appear in my system tray. I don't know what it was doing the rest of the time. Even running with ActiveSync disabled didn't seem to help. It was always hit or miss if HotSync would start at all. That was only the beginning. By default, HotSync Manager syncs with Palm Desktop, but that wasn't what I needed. I needed both PDAs to sync with Outlook. For this, Sony provides IntelliSync Lite. IntelliSync does the job, I suppose, but there are two things I didn't like about it. One, it requires you configure its conduits via a separate application, rather than in the standard conduit manager in HotSync. This is different from Chapura's PocketMirror, which Handspring and Palm bundle with their devices. Two, IntelliSync kept crashing my system. After I installed it, my Windows 98SE laptop started getting "blue screens of death" at random intervals. It could have been a memory limitation, but I've got 160MB of RAM, which should be more than enough for Windows 98. I crashed twice before I got a successful sync with Outlook. At this point, I had the Clié connecting with the PC and successfully (between crashes) synchronizing with Outlook 2002. I installed all the programs I wanted, and that seemed to work fine. Now I had to get all my ebooks onto the device. I have about 19MB of ebooks from Peanut Press on my Jornada's CF card, some in a "library" folder of stuff I've read but nearly half of them still in my "reading list" folder of stuff I haven't gotten to yet. I needed to get that over to my Clié so I could read them there as well. It seemed like a pretty easy task. First I took the CF card out of my Jornada, put it into a CF to PC Card adaptor, and put in into a free PC Card slot on my laptop, where Windows mounted it as a removable drive. So far, so good. Then I ran Audio Player on the Clié, and entered Transfer Mode. This also mounts the Clié's Memory Stick as a removable drive in Windows. At which point my system locked up solid. No blue screen like the IntelliSync crashes, just a complete lack of keyboard or mouse response. More rebooting... I finally got the Memory Stick mounted and copied the files over. Now I had the applications and most of the data that I needed on the Clié. So what did I get for my labors? (I was at three hours by now, enough to buy a small PDA if I were billing a client for this...) The first thing I noticed is that compared to the screen on my Jornada, or even the screen on my Toshiba e570, the Clié screen seemed cramped and milky. Too much white and not enough black, and the sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts in Palm Reader Pro were distinctly gray compared to the black, crisp text in Palm Reader Pro on my Jornada. Even though I had more pixels, I was distinctly aware of having less space. Maybe this is why iPaq fans crow so much about the iPaq's 3.8 inch screen compared to the 3.5 inch screens of most other Pocket PCs. I also quickly ran into another bugaboo of PalmOS, file conversions. I had a lot of saved web articles and web forum discussions that I wanted to read on my PDA, and while I would have just opened the raw HTML on my Jornada, the Clié required me to manually convert them all to PalmDoc or iSilo format. You could make the argument that by default, Word and Excel files are converted by ActiveSync to their simpler Pocket PC formats, but at least this is done automatically with no user intervention required. Something else I noticed was how long I was waiting for HotSync to finish every time I had to sync something. Not only is HotSync a manual process, initiated by pushing a button (compared to ActiveSync's automatically keeping things in sync every time something changes on either the PC or the Pocket PC), but because PalmOS doesn't support multitasking, my PDA is useless for as long as the HotSync process takes. I've gotten into the habit of reading an ebook or checking my schedule while my Pocket PC syncs in the cradle, but I can't do that with the Clié. After nearly five hours of tinkering, I gave up in frustration. My Clié N710C is just too hard to set up and configure and maintain for me to use it as a "second primary" PDA. I'll still install stuff to the Clié and play around with it, but I can't carry it alone. All my "real" data will stay on my Pocket PC, which will always be with me even when I'm carrying the Clié. I realize things might be easier with my new dream Clié, the NR-70V, which runs PalmOS 4.1 and can sync USB natively, and that if I went out and bought PocketMirror or DataViz's Desktop To Go to sync with Outlook instead of IntelliSync, I might have better luck. I'll revisit that if and when I get an NR-70V. For now, though, I'm sticking with my Pocket PC. It's just simpler. Jeff Kirvin
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