Product Reviews

Missing Sync for Pocket PC is an attempt to ensure that Mac users aren't locked out of the world of Microsoft's handheld operating system. It's developed by Mark/Space, the company that also produces equivalent software for use with Sony's Clie series of Palm OS devices.

Like the Palm version, the product goes further than just allowing the handheld to synchronise with your calendar, adding extra little features that make using a handheld with a Mac a much more pleasant experience. At present, the list of devices supported is limited to 32 known working handhelds, including most of HP's popular iPaq range, but if it runs either Pocket PC 2002 or 2003, it should work with Missing Sync.

The main part of the product consists of two elements. The first is a simple application that listens to your USB ports until a Pocket PC device attempts to make a connection. Once it's connected, it allows you to mount the device on your desktop as a drive volume, so you can drag and drop files to and from it. If you have a removable media card in your Pocket PC, this is also accessible.

Once connected, the second part of the product comes into play: an iSync conduit that allows you to synchronise the Calendar, Contacts and Tasks applications on your Pocket PC with Address Book and iCal on the Mac, just as you would a Palm handheld. This works beautifully, and using an HP Jornada 568 we were able to synchronise contact and appointment information

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perfectly every time. In fact, we found Missing Sync to be more reliable at synchronising than the Palm conduit.

Pocket rocket

In addition to this, there are two further plug-ins for iPhoto and iTunes, which allow you to transfer photos and songs directly from these applications to your Pocket PC. These were very simple to use, with the Pocket PC appearing as a device in the iTunes Source bar and as an option under the Export menu in iPhoto. To put songs on your Pocket PC, all you do is drag them to its icon in iTunes, which couldn't be easier. But there are two minor limitations.

The first is speed. iSync is not the fastest synchronisation tool around, and Missing Sync makes it slower still. We found that synchronising our calendars with a .Mac account, Pocket PC and iPod took a little over five minutes for some 350 contacts and many calendar events. The problem is the amount of data being thrown around, especially repeating events which add a considerable overhead to what's being synchronised. Although you can select which calendars to synchronise, we would have liked to have seen an option to synchronise only between set dates, which would have made it easier to reduce synchronisation times.

What's more, at present there's no support for playing AAC-encoded songs in Windows Media Player, and we could find no way to put songs on a storage card instead of the Pocket PC's main memory.

Another problem, and more of a limitation of iSync than Missing Sync, is mail handling. There's no option to synchronise mail, and it only works with iCal and Address Book. Mark/Space is working on synchronisation with Entourage, but as yet there's no way to synchronise your email, which is a minor but important limitation.

Overall, even given these limitations, Missing Sync represents a real breakthrough product for the Mac, giving Mac users much wider options for handhelds than ever before. If you have a Pocket PC and it's one of the supported devices, this is must-have buy at a bargain price.