Re: [SAGE] Handheld devices (phone, PDA, remote access)

[Matt Pounsett <matt@conundrum.com>]

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On 2007-Mar-27, at 08:37, Bennett wrote:

> Hello,
>
> After reading Time Management for System Administrators, I've been  
> carrying an iPaq along with my phone.  Now that I've gotten over  
> the wall of making it a habit, I find myself wishing that I could  
> just simply carry one device.

I've had that wish myself, a few times.

I'm currently carrying just a blackberry 8700r.  It's mostly adequate  
to the task, but not quite.  It has a browser that's good enough for  
most things I want to do from a phone, a few shareware ssh clients  
that are okay for emergencies (I'm using Idokorro Mobile SSH) and a  
reasonably good encrypted password store.  The main issue I've got is  
that there are no good sync options for my Mac calendar/address book/ 
etc.

Blackberry adopted development of a formerly shareware package called  
PocketMac which used to just barely work but, ironically, got worse  
once Blackberry was doing development for it.  It now regularly  
duplicates entries and messes up address book and calendar categories  
when doing bi-directional syncs.  If I switch to uni-directional  
syncs (always overwrite the blackberry with whatever's on my desktop)  
it gets better, but will still occasionally restore objects to my  
desktop that are supposed to be deleted.  That's of limited  
usefulness anyway though, because I often make changes to my address  
book or calendar directly on the blackberry (because my desktop isn't  
handy) and then have to manually reproduce those changes on the  
desktop.  Very frustrating.

I could switch to the Blackberry native desktop software, but that  
means abandoning the built-in address book and calendaring functions  
of my Macs, which I'm not prepared to do.  It's far more useful for  
me to have those synced properly between applications on my computer,  
and between the computers that I use, than between my computers and  
my mobile.

YMMV of course, and I'd be happy to hear from anyone who's made this  
setup work better than I have.

Matt


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