Where is Your Information? Push Email Proves Sync Benefits
by Ewan Spence
Where is your information? One of the keys to a good mobile device is how well it handles both the PIM functionality and the PIM synchronization. And it’s this synchronization I wanted to touch on. One of the major steps forward in the mobile space has been the ability to stop worrying about your data.
Back when Palms were young, and Symbian was still powering the Psion PDA, synchronization was a big issue, but caused a huge number of headaches. Palm’s Hotsync required a connection and a trigger – do the synchronisation now – and while talking to Palm Desktop was rock solid in terms of data compatibility, the same could not be said when using the conduits to Microsoft Outlook. Simple problems like when an outlook contact had a business and personal address and the Palm has space for one meant you could never be sure what would move over even before you started editing. The Psion/Symbian software wasn’t much better.
In those days, I regarded my PIM data as a ‘block’ of information. If I did any editing on one device, I would not do anything on the other sync partner until after a sync. It was the only way that I could trust my data to be correct. Nowadays, it’s slightly different, both in software and practice. The first is that bundled software with the main business enterprise devices is much more robust, partly because of the power and capability of the mobile devices. The second is that technology (such as ActiveSync/MS Exchange and SyncML) has moved away from having discrete periods of synchronisation, to constant small interrogations.
This has changed how I perceive my data from a block of information to a ‘cloud’ of information; a cloud that surrounds each device I use. There’s a growing confidence your personal data will always be available no matter what device you have – push email (and synced email boxes) was the first step to giving our data an almost hive mind like existence over all our devices.
Nobody wants to fiddle with synchronization any more, it should be a case of picking up your laptop, mobile or PDA and walking out the door. Now the industry is making stuff that ‘just works,’ watch the marketplace continue to respond favorably.
