Evan Kleiman
- 2002.04.17
With today's always high-paced lifestyles, people are trying to
find a way to manage all of their contacts, appointments, et
cetera. They do this through any means necessary - sticky notes,
backs of napkins, and other items.
One of the most popular ways to manage your information is with
a PIM (personal information manager) for your computer. With it you
can link your Palm or virtually any other computer-aware PDA
(personal digital assistant), store your contacts, keep your
appointments, and track virtually anything else you can think of.
This is a very popular niche.
Which is the best application for you to choose as your own
PIM?
While there are many options to choose from, the only two really
big ones available for Mac OS X are Microsoft
Entourage V.x and Palm Desktop 4.0
for X, and I'll be looking at the two programs based on several
categories: speed, Price, features, interface/customizability,
compatibility with the Palm and other applications, and overall
quality.
Speed
Most new Microsoft applications are slow, and Entourage X is no
exception. Especially on my Blue and White
G3/350, it seems to take forever to load - and even longer for
something to respond once you click a button, which is can grow
quite annoying for frequent users of the program.
Palm Desktop, on the other hand, seems to load much faster than
its Microsoft counterpart and is generally perkier and more
responsive in everyday use.
Price
This one is probably the easiest win of all for Palm Desktop:
It's free, whether you have a Palm or not. Entourage, however, is
part of the rather expensive (generally over US$400) Microsoft
Office Suite.
Features
Both programs have such features as multiple users, a calendar
with a complete date book, and a contact management system.
However, Entourage seems to shine much brighter in this category
than the Palm Desktop.
Entourage boasts a full-featured email client and a much better
address book than Palm Desktop offers.
Interface/Customizability
With Aqua's new interface, many of today's higher-end software
developers have been encouraged to create programs that are fully
compatible with the interface standards for OS X. However,
Palm seemed to pretty much totally miss the boat on this one.
While their user interface is totally customizable with one of
their many skins (Red Chili Pepper are my fave), Palm's default
interface and many other things don't really seem to match very
well with Aqua.
On the plus side for Palm Desktop, I like their button layout
better. When you first start Entourage, you are pretty much unable
to tell which button does what, since they're not very cleanly
labeled. Unless you're patient enough to find out what there are
via the tool-tips, you're pretty much left to figure out where the
address book is - the icon with the two people on it or the thing
that looks like an address book. Surprisingly, it is not the
later.
But once you're over the initial confusion of Entourage X, you
shouldn't have much trouble using it, so I'm going to have to go
with Entourage in this category, since it is much cleaner for
everyday use, albeit un-customizable.
Compatibility
If you are a regular Palm user, Palm Desktop is the obvious
choice, since it offers more compatibility with its built in Hot
Sync technology. However, since both applications offer the ability
to behave well with other programs (i.e., through the
importing/exporting data), if you're not using a Palm-compatible
device, the decision is a bit harder.
Microsoft once again comes through with totally incompatible
products; Entourage is unable to import anything, even when I
actually clicked on the file I wanted in its "import" box. Palm
Desktop went through this task flawlessly.
Overall Quality
While Entourage has many nice features, such as its built in
date reminder, unless you absolutely need a built-in email client
or love their Aqua interface, save your money and go with Palm
Desktop. Your wallet (and anti-Microsoft conscience) will thank
you.
