Russell Beattie has a great rant on phone syncing. I’ve been working on my own long sync rant that I’ll hopefully finish some day… The basic premise was to be:
- Everyone should support SyncML
- Sync belongs in the OS (score Apple)
- Sync must work over any available transport, esp. the Internet
- Sync needs to be open to all applications (score Microsoft)
- Sync needs to be open to all devices
- Devices are not just Phones / PDAs, but also PCs, Laptops, MP3 Players, Media Centers, etc (Apple is way ahead of Microsoft here, tho I think some of it depends on having a .Mac account)
- Sync’ing many types of devices will be the norm, and some devices may never sync directly with the “authoratative” source
My dream is for Microsoft to move ActiveSync from the Embedded group to the Windows group, put it in the OS, open it up to everyone, add SyncML, and think outside the (PIM) box. On the phone front, I think there’s more value to Microsoft in sync’ing well with everyone (within reason) than providing an awesome experience for a miniscule minority of phones. MS SmartPhones may be picking up momentum, but right now most carriers don’t offer any, most that do only offer one model, and they’re often more expensive than the alternatives.
As great as iSync may be, it suffers from as many limitations as ActiveSync — they just are not the same limitations.
