Product Reviews

The latest version of Mark/Space's Windows Mobile sync software adds support for Windows Mobile 6, which is good news for anyone upgrading their handset. We tested it with an HTC Touch and a Windows Mobile 5-based XDA Exec.

Problems with synchronising over Bluetooth persist from version 3. This isn't all Missing Sync's fault, but we recommend that you use a USB connection.

Missing Sync installs a small application on your handset or to a storage card if required. Features carried over from the previous version include the application's battery charge indicator, and presets that save combinations of plug-ins - handy for quickly syncing only the essentials such as calendar and notes when you're in a hurry.

The main window collapses into an iTunes-like mini mode, with buttons for mount, sync, install and disconnect. A status area shows the connected device's name and battery level. This would be more useful if it let you select a preset and gave a better indication of progress when synchronising.

You can synchronise call logs and SMS messages, and view them on the Mac desktop, including details such as the date, time and duration. Everything is organised by caller/sender and

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can be filtered down to just incoming, outgoing and missed calls. You can search SMS messages in Spotlight, and export to comma-separated variable files. Sadly Missing Sync doesn't let you reply by SMS - only email. Also missing is support for MMS messages on the desktop.

The new video plug-in encodes video as Mpeg-4 rather than Windows Media. You prepare videos for your handset by dragging them to the Missing Sync window. The Video Helper application converts the video, but this is very basic; there's only a progress bar for the movie being converted, and no indication of how many remain after it. We had trouble converting an Mpeg-2 file copied from an EyeTV recording, despite having Apple's Mpeg-2 codec installed, but unprotected H.264 movie trailers from Apple's site worked fine.

Output is a maximum of 320 x 240 pixels at 15fps, which is sufficient for most handsets, although Microsoft's media player doesn't upscale on higher-resolution devices such as the XDA Exec. The plug-in for photos can scale to fixed or device resolutions, but you'll have to resort to another application to make the most of higher-resolution screens.

When syncing music, the relevant plug-in syncs only MP3s by default, but it is flexible enough to add other formats based on their file extension if you prefer a different format or want to use an alternative media player.

Dragging files to Missing Sync copies them to the connected device, but mounting a device on the Mac desktop lets you browse its file system in the Finder. This is also a convenient way to remove files.

This version of Missing Sync is invaluable to owners of Windows Mobile handsets. If backing up call logs and SMS messages is vital, it's worth upgrading, although the addition of MMS support would be nice.