Additionally, the Palm Desktop's Address Book makes it easy to sort by category when you use the Category dropdown menu, pictured in Figure J.

FIGURE J


Palm Desktop's Category Menu makes it easy to change and edit your categories. Roll over picture for a larger image.

While you can sort your contacts in Outlook in a similar (admittedly more powerful) way, it's not nearly as intuitive.

Also, assigning and changing categories is a snap in the Palm Desktop's Address Book. You simply select a category from the category dropdown menu. In Outlook, PocketMirror's default setting synchronizes your categories to a custom field called the "PalmPilot Category." To change or assign a category, you must either make the change on your Palm device or manually type the category in the PalmPilot Category field, leaving you open to the possibility of mistyping the category name.

It's also painfully obvious in the Contacts module that Outlook and your Palm device were not designed to work together. As you can see in Figure K, an Outlook Contact card offers many of the same fields as an Address Book entry and then some.

FIGURE K


While most of these fields look familiar, there are a few extras too. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Under the General tab, you'll see that Outlook supports up to three addresses, but only the one that's marked as the mailing address is synchronized with your Palm device. There's also a field for a Web address, but this isn't synchronized with your Palm device either, unless you map it as one of your four custom fields. The PocketMirror help file explains how to do this.

The other tabs present the same problem. As shown in Figure L, the Details tab offers a number of useful fields.

FIGURE L


It'll take some work to get this extra data onto your Palm device. Roll over picture for a larger image.

However, unless you map them to one of your four custom fields, this information won't be synchronized. As you can see, there are many more than four extra fields in Outlook, which means you'll have to pick and choose.

Another problem relates to the email addresses of the contact records for people in your organization. As you can see by looking at the email field back in Figure K, my email address shows up as Draper, Robert L., not robert@acompany.com. This happens because each address on your company's Microsoft Exchange server is rendered in Outlook as an alias--and it's this alias that gets synchronized to your Palm device. While the alias looks nice in the address field of an email message, it's next to useless if you're away from the office and trying to look up a coworker's email address on your Palm device. PocketMirror 3.0 fixes this problem. You can get the upgrade at http://www.chapura.com/html/downloads.html.

Finally, I've noticed that Outlook has the bad habit of rearranging the order of phone numbers and email addresses on the Palm device. For example, let's say you've arranged someone's information in a particular order (like placing the work phone, work fax, and work email address together, then listing the home phone and home email address). Don't be surprised if, after several weeks, these entries get rearranged.