Oh yeah, iPhones are fainting daisies :rolleyes: Admit it, Omniscient, you’ve never actually used an iPhone and believe every bit of negative press without thinking about it.
Drat - I popped back in to suggest checking out Google’s ability to sync with Outlook, iPhone etc. as it seems like that would have been perfect for what you need. Sounds like that won’t work 
If your fallback is manual entry of work-related stuff into your personal device, at least the lack of ability to sync anything from work means you can choose any device that meets your needs (as opposed to having to choose a particular device because it works with the work PC.
There’s a new Quicken app out:
Are you considering the iPod Touch for work? If yes, then it seems that you are limited by how much your company will support it. If you’re looking to replace your Palm Tungsten E for personal use, then the iPod Touch is great, especially if you install the right apps.
The native Calendar app is pretty good and it can synchronize through WiFi with an Exchange server. There’s another app called Pocket Informant that offers additional features. Both apps can sync with Google Calendar.
The Contacts and Mail apps are also good, but you won’t get complete integration with the Calendar or a Task/Todo application.
Calendar, Mail, and Contacts can be synchronized with Outlook.
There’s no native Task/Todo app so you would need to buy and install something like Todo, Toodledo, or Things. The first two can synchronize wirelessly with online services. Also, *Todo *can sync with iCal, *Toodledo *with Outlook, and *Things *with the Mac version of the software.
BTW, the additional apps are about $10 each, and there are many others that are available for less.
That hasn’t been my experience. I treat my mobile electronics roughly. I was a rabid Palm devotee, and would put my Palm (TX, E2, iQue, III, V) in my back pocket all the time. But their plastic screens required screen protectors, and they’d still gunk up after about two weeks. Since the iPhone and iPod Touch have glass screens, I use them both without screen protectors or cases. My 16-month-old iPhone screen is still in great shape without any degradation in image, and I jam it into my back pocket all the time.
What finally allowed me to ditch my E2 (because my TX had a well-known fatal screen calibration problem) was when HanDBase was made available for the iPhone. Now I can keep and manipulate all of my lists of things, and this week I bought QuickOffice (but I don’t encourage anyone else to purchase it yet). It reads and writes Excel and Word files and has copy/paste. However, it’s a little light on spreadsheet cell formatting (I had to widen the columns on my Mac and re-sync in order to get my preexisting spreadsheets to show my format-happy cells).
Global copy and Paste will be available in OS 3.0. We just got an SDK update this past week, and I’m anxious to start playing with it.
Things you may want from the app store:
- Remote, which alllows you to control your iTunes and AppleTV. Many other wi-fi remote controls are available, and I use one of them (Snatch) pretty much all the time to control my Mac & PC (generally when watching movies in VLC, iTunes or DVDs)
- HanDBase, which can also be used to make simple spreadsheets
- Some good astronomy apps (they cost around $10; example: GoSkyWatch)
- Bloomberg (or others), which I use to track my stock portfolio, constantly updated
- Surfing the web from anywhere (iPhone only unless you find a free wi-fi hotspot)
- Maps & Voice-recognition Google: E.g., say “costco 90266” and it’ll pop up search results, and the first one will be a map showing the Costco in Hawthorne (the nearest one to Manhattan Beach zip code 90266). Press the button, and it launches Maps which, with two touches, maps a route from my current location to that location.
- Voice recorder. Okay; my iQue has that as well
- PocketPedia, which lists all of my DVDs, along with cover art and descriptions.
- HP-41C emulator (not very useful unless you’re a total nerd)
- Kindle/Stanza book readers
- Play music
Other than that, the iPhone & iPod Touch are total crap.
This sparks an interesting question, that I hadn’t even really considered. I use an iPhone and would love to be able to access my office calendar (Microsoft Office 2007). I know very little (or effectively nothing) about WEBdav and associated servers and publishing and sharing calendars. Is there a way to share an exchange calendar so its accessible by my iPhone if my office also won’t allow any private installation of apps on the office computer?
My wife uses her iPod Touch as a PDA. That was why we bought it. (Music is just incidental; she’s had the thing for 2+ months and I just put music on it for her this week.)
We realized that all the things she does with her laptop were web-based. She doesn’t use excel or photoshop or anything. So now we don’t have to tote that laptop around when we travel, and, even better, she can carry her iPod around at work and get instant notifications from her office’s wifi network that she has new email. (She never had time to stop, sit down at her computer, and check her e-mail before.)
I’m also looking to replace an ancient PDA (Handspring Visor) and one near-absolute requirement is the ability to import my 8+ year old Datebook into the new device. I enter most of my datebook/memos on the computer & would like to be able to sync with multiple PC’s.
Importing the address DB is also important, but not vital. I also want to transfer my memos and e-book PDB files.
I don’t suppose any devices still support the Graffiti text entry feature? sigh…
I think it’s still valid to ask what your experience with the iPhone is, exactly.
You can export your address book via “vcards” or something like that; it’s a rudimentary common format for importing and exporting address book entries. There’s something similar for datebook entries. I exported my (hundreds of) Palm calendar entries into the intermediate format, imported that into iCal, and iCal does two-way syncs with the iPhone. Not sure about the Windows platform.
There’s at least one attempt at character recognition in an iPhone app. It’s clunky and mostly worthless to me, but Graffiti was successful because it just tried to work, not to mimic regular characters. I found it very speedy. With copy/paste coming, I’ll say confidently that someone is going to make at least some note pad app that recognizes Graffiti characters, and from there you could copy and paste information elsewhere.
I have a third party app that’s faster than the current on-screen keyboard – it shows a keyboard and you trace a path through all the letters on the keyboard. It types what it thinks is the word into the text area, but also has a small menu of about eight to ten other word candidates that fit the path you swiped. With the menu thing, I think I get pretty good accuracy; perhaps one word in 15 or 18, I have to just hit the backspace and retry the path. I assume it would be insane for the company that makes that app (Stylewriter) not to support copy/paste.
(Warning: Vaguely anti-Apple statement from groo in 3 … 2 … 1 …) If Apple were smart, they’d allow the text input APIs to utilize any number of text input methods, be they Graffiti or the Stylewriter thing (or seven other things that someone smart is probably thinking about). But that would involve licensing fees and disrupt the “unity” of the interface, so I don’t think it’s likely. Sometimes they get a little bit too benevolent dictator-y.
Two things the Palm has that the iPhone/iPod Touch still don’t have (I was thinking about this all day) are: bluetooth stereo mp3 streaming (a third party app) and global search. The Palm OS event model defined a specific event that each app could respond to for global searches, as distinct from a normal “launch” event.
Curiously, the Apple Newton had a “data soup” paradigm which may have inspired the search function in the Palm OS. Likewise, Graffiti was created to run on the Newton by people who hated the character recognition. Apple basically came out with the first PDA, which showed off what was good and what was stupid, and Palm came in and did it right (for the time). This supports what I think is best about the iPhone: love it or hate it, but it’s raised the bar, and all the big players are competing with it feature-by-feature. (The point is “Internet everywhere,” not necessarily “iPhone uber alles”).
Depending on where the ebook files came from, there may be a native iPhone/iTouch reader (ereader.com makes one, and IIRC it’s a free download).
Oh gee, look how that works. Other electronic devices also break when you drop them. And your point is…?
I never said iPhones were made of adamantium, I just said that you were overstating their fragility, and probably also talking trash about their usability while having no experience in using one. I don’t have an iPhone or a smart phone of any kind, which is why I did not offer any personal observations. I offered a resource that might help the OP make a choice based on an impartial survey of all smart-phone owners.
Notice that I also said nothing negative about any other smart-phone. You can own whatever you want, but it’s bullshit to put down something you don’t even use. And I’m right about that, aren’t I? You’ve never owned an iPhone.
Thanks. Interesting, but not useful - it only works with the online version of Quicken, which does not have all the features of the desktop version. Nor does it sync with the desktop version (as in, if you enter transactions online, there’s no way for them to get onto your desktop). There’s a lot of anger on the Quicken forums over Intuit’s refusal to support a Pocket Quicken-like tool.
Most likely a nonissue for the OP, as he (she?) has made no mention of Quicken being a requirement. But it’s one of the major reasons we won’t be making a similar switch.
I’m an old-school Palm user, and I’ve switched to the ipod Touch. Most of the apps I remember from my Palm days are available on the Apple app store now, so it actually works as a PDA. It’s not perfect–as a pure PDA my TX is better, but the Touch is good enough. With the glass screen I don’t bother with a carrying case; I just carry it loose in my pocket. It’s smaller and more durable than my Palm. My TX ended up with dead spots on the screen (where the stylus wouldn’t register) and digitizer problems–none of that on the Touch so far.
Big downsides are:
- None of the apps multitask, so for example you can’t have apps interact with each other or work while the Touch is turned off (my Palm was set up to turn on while I was asleep, backup and download everything I needed for the following day–the Touch can’t do that). The lack of interaction between e.g., the calendar and to-do apps is the major thing that prevents it from being a world-class PDA.
- It’s slow. They hide the slowness with fancy screen animations, but it’s a lot slower than my TX, and it crawls compared to my Tungsten.
- I don’t really like the virtual keyboard. I never did much data entry on my PDAs, so this isn’t a big issue for me, but if you enter a lot of data on your PDA, you’ll miss the stylus.
- The screen isn’t as big as the TX. I miss the bigger screen when I’m using it as an ebook. To be honest, I read on my TX pretty regularly, but not so much on the Touch; I don’t enjoy reading on the screen so much.
I’m also a PalmOS user considering jumping onto the bandwagon. Can all you helpful folks answer a couple of more questions?
[ul]
[li]Can I sync an iPod Touch or iPhone on both a Mac and a PC? Regular iPods only work on Windows if you reformat them for Windows.[/li][li]Ideally I want to sync my work computer’s Outlook to the iPod, and then to iCal and Contacts on the home Macs. The MobileMe tools don’t work at work due to the firewall, so the iPod would have to be the medium of transfer.[/li][li]Any recommendations for a Documents to Go replacement for viewing Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files? No way to browse the store without iTunes, and I could Google, but you all seem to have experience.[/li][/ul]
The main reason I’m debating the iPod Touch vs. iPhone is because I have a work cell phone, and so I have to carry two devices with me 100% of the time anyway (well, I do; my work phone and my Clié).
The iPhone data plan is affordable (and I’m a waaay out of Contract AT&T subscriber already, so what’s two more years to me?).
The 16GB iPod Touch and 16GB iPhone are essentially the same price (I’d get a corporate discount on the iPod).
So the only difference that I see is that I’d have 3G internet whenever an open Wi-Fi isn’t available if I had the iPhone. That, and a camera (which can be a liability where I work).
Am I missing something else?