iPhone not so much

Recently, I shifted, or I'm trying to shift, from a Palm Pilot to an iTouch - iTouch is an iPhone without the phone.

Ho hum. While the iTouch is clearly nice for some things it' s not as business-ready as I'd like it to be.

Crucial to me are: contacts, calendar, and email in that order with contacts and calendar being the most serious of the three. The iTouch has all three and they all work okay. BUT. When it comes to sync time with a PC the glitches set in.

Oh ya, I'm supposed to be all MAC, right? That's actually one of the drawbacks to the iTouch. Once you enter the iTouch world you're in MAC land and don't think you're not. Sync of all the features is done through iTunes. iTunes may or may not play nice with non-MAC applications so in my case it crashes MS Outlook everytime I do a sync.

There's probably a fix but I have only so much time in the day. On top of that, the iTouch draws its power from the USB connection to the computer. That's okay except every time you connect the device, it crashes Outlook.

On the positive side, iTouch is a great device for music and probably for video and photos. While I do produce video at work I've failed so far to load any of my video productions into the iTouch. Sure, I'm missing a step but it's hardly intuitive. I've been handling media for a long time folks, and I don't want to have to puzzle over loading a device.

In contrast, my Palm never gave me any troubles with snyc. I had contacts and calendar on Outlook and in the system my employer uses. I could do email, some web browsing and it accepted video and audio and photos without a fight.

On top of that, I could slap a keyboard on the Palm and take notes at a meeting or do serious email communications. On the iTouch I'm stuck with that screen keyboard and my two thick thumbs. Sorry, that's good for a quick text message or a very short email but it's limited.

Those are my laments about the iTouch. Tonight I went rummaging about in my bag for the iTouch to find a contact and realized I'd left it on the desk at work. But there was the trusty old Palm and it still had my contacts. When I picked it up and turned it on it was there for me like a trusted friend.

Am I geting old fashioned?