what mobile device would you recommend

[Chris Hastie]

On 27/07/09 15:02, Alexander Schröter wrote:
> I am looking for a small portable device which is able to sync the calendar, 
> tasks and contacts (notes are not that important to me). Of course I don't 
> want to do that over the expensive phone line, so it needs to have wireless 
> lan (if you do know that your phone can connect to TTLS - PAP encrypted 
> Wireless Lans - please let me know because this is what we use at the 
> university).
>
>   

I've been playing with my Nokia E63 for a few days with reasonable
results. The problems I'm having seem to be more to do with other
clients than with the phone or SyncML functionality.

Calendar is working well. One or two appointments seem to have been
duplicated, but I suspect that is down to another client (also using
Outlook + Toltec, Kontact and Thunderbird + SyncKolab).

Tasks seems to work in one direction only - towards the phone. The phone
config has no specific entry for tasks, but they seem to be being synced
with the calendar. Whether this is changed if I turn off showing tasks
in the calendar in the webclient I haven't established. But the phone
recognises them as tasks rather than meetings.
However, if I create a task on the phone, despite the sync progress
saying it is sending a calendar entry to the server, I never see
anything turn up there. Nor do changes made on the phone (eg marking as
complete) seem to show up on the server.

Contacts is giving me the most trouble (though I guess if I actually
used tasks much the fact that it's one-way would be bugging me a lot
more). It works, but requires some care. The problem seems to be that
not all clients are created equal, and not all make use of the same
fields. The field used on the phone as a default for all those numbers
I've had since phones only stored one number per contact isn't displayed
by Horde, Outlook or Thunderbird, but is by Kontact. The phone is fine -
it seems to cope merrily with an arbitrary number of fields, but the
various clients are more fussy about which fields are used, only display
some, and can't agree on which ones they display.

I'm also having trouble with duplicates. I painstakingly removed all
such things on the phone, moved a few numbers to new fields etc and
synced. Everything looked fine in Horde. But a lot of the numbers I'd
deleted still appeared in TB, Kontact and Outlook. After painstakingly
removing them all again in TB, they came back the next time I synced.
Phone and Horde still look pretty much OK, but other clients are
littered with duplicates and things I think I've deleted but they just
haven't gone away. If anyone has any clues on this I'd be grateful.

I'm afraid I've no idea if the phone will cope with TTLS - PAP encrypted
WLANs - I've never encountered one. It is fine with my basic WLAN and
with a 3g connection.

HTH

Chris