Sometimes, Apple gets it exactly right

kevindente — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 05:15:00 GMT

Recently, my wife and I replaced our antiquated cell phones with snazzy new Motorola RAZR phones. Not overjoyed by the thought of manually reentering all of our phone numbers, we were hoping to simply copy the numbers from our respective computers to the phones (not ALL of our contacts phone numbers, of course, just the select few that merit being on the cell).

My wife is a web designer, so naturally she uses a Mac, while I use a PC. We sat down at her machine and connected it via a USB cable to the phone. We launched iSync, and the phone was automatically recognized and identified correctly. Her contact list in iSync didn't look right, but we quickly realized that was because she didn't have Entourage set to sync with iSync. One checkbox later and that was fixed. She created a special "Cell phone" group, copied the contacts that she wanted on the phone into that group, and synced the phone. It worked perfectly.

Sitting down at my PC to accomplish the same task, I realized...I got nothing. Some quick Googling revealed that doing something similar requires either paying for a software package called Motorola Phone Tools (so I can sync with my free phone), or using some open source software called BitPim. In either case, I need to install a USB driver for the phone (before plugging it in - is that bit of stupidity being fixed in Vista?). A that point, I realized I didn't have time to mess with it for now.

I'm not one to lavish Apple with usability praise out-of-hand - generally I think a lot of the Mac's UI is not intrinsically easier to use than the Windows equivalent, it's just different. In this case, though, I've got to hand it to Apple - everything worked exactly as it should have.

I hope that the new Windows Mobile Device Center that comes with Vista will provide a a similarly simple experience for us Windows users.

Kevin Dente's Blog : Mobile

Sometimes, Apple gets it exactly right