Product Reviews

One of the main scourges of the technological life is gadget creep: the sudden realisation that you have numerous devices in your pocket which could, if manufacturers were on the ball, be combined into a single super-tool.

So, anything that manages to effectively combine one or more gizmos should be welcomed with open arms, and the iPod is proving to be one of the more extensible devices around. Although you can't install software on it, the applications that are pre-installed - and especially the Notes program - are proving to be much more flexible than Apple probably intended them to be. And PocketMac iPod Edition manages to exploit this flexibility and cram the majority of the functions of a PDA into the iPod.

Of course, the iPod plug-in that Apple supplies with iSync already includes some PDA functionality, most notably the ability to synchronise addresses and calendar information from your Mac. However, this only works with Apple's own applications - iCal and Address Book - which means that if you use Microsoft Entourage, you're out of luck. PocketMac addresses this problem, and adds the ability to synchronise email from either Mail or Entourage, notes from either Entourage or Stickies (or both), and - perhaps best of all - text-based documents including RTF, Word and PDF.

For contacts and calendar, PocketMac uses the appropriate applications

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built into the iPod. However, for email and documents, it converts from the Mac-native format into text, and transfers the documents to the iPod's Notes application. Although the iPod can only handle notes of a maximum of 4KB in size, PocketMac breaks longer documents into smaller chunks, with links at the end of each note to take you to the next section. It's an effective solution that works surprisingly well.

Installing and using PocketMac is simple. It installs as a plug-in for iSync, which means that every time you synchronise, your iPod is updated (iSync can be set to do this automatically every time the iPod is plugged in). Once installed, you select the applications you want to synchronise, and whether you want to completely delete any data already on the iPod on the first synchronisation, or to merge the iPod data with your Mac applications. Once this is done, just hit the sync button and the process begins, taking a couple of minutes to complete. In our tests, the process worked perfectly, and the application itself was clear and easy to use.

However, the iPod's design does mean there are some limitations if you want to use it as a PDA. Of course, you can't author or edit any documents on the iPod, and neither can you reply to any emails you've downloaded to it. The small screen also makes it somewhat wearing on the eyes when reading anything longer than a couple of screens, and the 4KB limitation is still awkward, despite PocketMac making it much easier by linking documents.

But these are mostly limitations of the iPod rather than the PocketMac software, which makes the best job possible of turning the iPod into a PDA. If this product cost $50, we'd have reservations about it, but at $23.41 - around £14 at current exchange rates - it's worth it just for the ability to synchronise calendar and contact information from Entourage. The extended capabilities that exploit the Notes application are also a welcome bonus.