Morning Paper: REVIEW: MissingSync For Blackberry

NOTE: This review was done by my good friend Murray over at Palm-Mac. None of the MP writers use "Blackberry AND Mac" go figure. So Murray agreed to step in and run it through it's paces. Since I have the utmost respect in his reviewing prowess, Murray had at it.

I got a chance to put this mac programme through its paces recently and have been quite impressed with it although the bottom line is, I would have to say it is over-priced in comparison to its Palm and Win-Mob counterparts.

What does it do? Well, it offers syncing in 7 main areas - contacts, calendar, iphoto, itunes, folder sync, notes and tasks. Within most of these areas you can specify which particular mac application you wish it
to sync with. For example, I can choose to sync the "notes" bit with the bundled MarkSpace Notepad or Yojimbo or Entourage, if I had the latter.

To sync, you just attach the Curve via the usb cable to your mac and it fires up the application very quickly and is ready to go surprisingly quickly. Whenever I try one of these syncing apps I try out each individual component seperately to avoid any mishaps. I tried out the iTunes integration first. Rather oddly, it deletes all the music already on the Curve (including playlists) which I had previously installed (painstakingly I may add) using the pc desktop Roxio application. This cheesed me off somewhat as I was then back to square one. However, the Missing Sync then proceeded to carry out a faultless syncing of all the tracks asked of it and it was again, pretty quick to do so. It doesn't however copy your iTunes playlists per se and as you can't compose playlists on the device itself this leave one rather snookered on that front.

Next up was picture syncing. It can both import and export pics from your Blackberry to and from iPhoto. Be warned - I had already loaded on a lot of pics via another source and did not notice that the "settings" pane for iPhoto continues both an import and export pane band thus, it started to copy all the pics from the Curve into iPhoto...all 400 of them! Ooops. If you don't want your device pics transferred across then turn off the export feature. Nevertheless, this setting makes it easy to get pics taken with the camera into iPhoto. Again, I was surprised how quickly it took to get new pics onto the Curve...at first I thought it had not worked properly as it was so quick but there they were on the sd card...very impressive.

Contacts - no problem here. A very smooth and easy sync from my mac address book to the Curve.

Calendar - oops. This bit just wouldn't work for me but was the same with PocketMac and luckily I don't actually need to sync ical as I do that at work using Outlook. For others relying on their mac it may be more of an issue though....unless of course you can get it working yourself.

Notes - I like this bit a lot. I tried to sync it initially with Yojimbo but it only syncs the notes pane of entries, not the other bits so I quickly switched to the MarkSpace Notepad option. I then just copied and pasted bits of info into new Notes and these synced seamlessly to the Curve.

Folder Sync - I gotta be honest here. I have never used this bit before, not on the palm or the win-mob versions and thus wasn't expecting much. It is easy to set up though, create a folder on your mac, create one on the Blackberry and on the next sync the latter will appear on your sd card. They don't have to have the same names. You can then drop files onto the mac folder and on your next sync they will be copied to the sd card you created. Of course, you can only put in files that the Blackberry will be able to recognise the file format of, such as jpeg's, mp3's etc etc. Useful though....I think.

That's about it then. Overall, I found it quick and reliable (more so than the Win-Mob version) and easy to use. It comes with a simple to follow and easy to use help manual with pics to show you a step by step
guide. My criticisms would be that if you compare it to PocketMac for Blackberry, which is free, it doesn't really do anything extra and in comparison, at $39.99 with no trial, it is relatively expensive. If you
can get PocketMac to work, which I couldn't, then that would be a cheaper solution but not necessarily a better one. If it was half the price I would go for it no questions asked. My concern is that no doubt
markspace will add more features in due course, such as the ability to install applications, and that will involve another fairly costly upgrade fee which could make this an expensive bit of software. But...it
works and works well and that is something that also needs to be accounted for.

Mac System Requirements:
PowerPC G4, PowerPC G5, or Intel processor
Mac OS X v10.4.8 Tiger or later , or Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard
Internet connection for product registration
BlackBerry Requirements:
The following devices running version 4.0 and later of the BlackBerry operating system have been tested:
7100 series
7290 (Cingular/T-Mobile)
7250 (Verizon)
7520 (Nextel)
7130 series
8100 series (Pearl)
8300 (Curve)
8700 series
8703 series (Sprint)
8705
8707 series
8800 series
Other devices may work, but have not been tested.