[Russ Smith]

I'm one of those statistical anomalies; a person who's had no problems with ActiveSync and now WMDC at all. To really make things hard on WMDC, I switched to Thunderbird and Sunbird using BirdieSync along with WMDC. It still works flawlessly. ...makes me wonder what I'm doing right.

My wife, however, has had all manner of difficulties: Sometimes it will sync the "wrong way" and remove some carefully taken notes or changes to items. Sometimes it won't synch at all. Other times it will stop with errors (which produces my main complaint with AS/WMDC: Why is it so hard to figure out what exactly prevented the sync? Why can't we get the exact offending item with a note saying exactly what's "wrong.")

In order to try to solve her issues, I investigated various alternatives to AS and every one of them was worse than the original. Some wouldn't sync everything that AS does. Others crashed regularly. Some wouldn't even run once. I went back to AS because it was still better than the alternatives for synching with Windows Mobile.

So what about alternatives to Windows Mobile? I've experimented with those too. Linux has some pretty good GUIs, but other software needs to be recompiled for ARM and for the smaller screen. The iPhone has some really nice features and a lot of decent apps, but I really don't like the lack of cut-and-paste, the lack of a data card slot, and the fact that apps aren't local (so you have to be connected to use them). In both cases, I can't find anything that compares to the functionality of Pocket Informant.