The Resident Geek: Tech Advice for Your Time, Tasks & Toys

I love my Mac. It’s faster than my PC, it’s prettier than my PC, and it’s smaller. It’s not as compatible though. This really becomes an issue in regards to mobile devices. Unless you have an iPhone or iPod, it’s not likely to natively sync to your Mac.

The answer to this dilemma is third party software. But which should you choose? There’s plenty of software claiming to easily and conveniently synchronize your device with mac but which is best?

As a Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) user, I’ve only ever found one program that safely and quickly synchronizes my device: Missing Sync.

Missing Sync is one of multiple programs from Mark/Space. I’ve successfully synchronized a Windows Mobile 6 device with Mac and Exchange server. It did it quickly, and easily. There were no duplicates, no date errors, and even the categories synced nicely!
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to recover from problems caused by bad software. I’ve never had to go through this with MissingSync.

The only problem that I have yet to encounter with MissingSync was cause by a new type of USB connection called RNDIS. If MissingSync can’t seem to find your device, download this RNDIS/Serial swither from Palm and try again. It should find it.

MissingSync can be purchased for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm, PSP and Symbian. So far there’s no MissingSync for the PC; only the Mac.

The one major downside to MissingSync is the price. At $40 it’s far from free. There is another free app for the Mac called “Pocket Sync”, that I’ve tried. I wasn’t pleased. It refused to sync my tasks and seemed rather unreliable. When it comes to managing your life with technology, reliability is money. My suggestion: Pay the $40 and get what works.