Why I hate Palm

[Updated with more illustrative notes]

My PalmOS CLIE TJ-27 (the one with the stylus from heck) finally died. I dropped it. No big deal, my wife has one she isn't using. All I have to do is sync it ...

Wrong.

The backup restore sort of worked, except for a bunch of apps where it didn't. It left a remnant of TealLock that took me an hour to get rid of.

Then a sync replicated all my Outlook records -- three times for every one. Then the restore from a Palm device backup failed because I was restoring to a 'different device'. Riiiiigggghhht. So exactly what did those idiots think one needed a backup for?

I found the Outlook .ost file from my automated system backup of 1 am this morning and fixed up Outlook, then executed a sync back to the PDA. That worked.

Its easy to see why Palm died. Any one of the problems I ran into on this restore would have led 99% of the world to give up on the device.

Sure, this is a SONY device -- but these are all classic Palm OS problems. The Palm OS was great in its day, but the company was snowed by Microsoft and lost its way in the boom years. They never recovered. The darned OS needs a stake through its heart.

I guess I'm back to waiting for the rumored Apple SmartPhone, but I have to say that the history of sync services in OS X is not encouraging. And let's not mention iCal ....

Update 1/23/06: So everything works, except when I enable TealScript (I also hate Palm for dumping Graffiti One -- the version that worked) the number and alpha input areas are reversed. Fortunately I didn't delete the installer for the older version of TealScript.

Update 1/23/06b: Ok, I figured out the TealScript glitch. The new version of TS has some new advanced features. For example, it's now configurable for different input area setups. It's supposed to recognize the layout automatically, but it made the wrong guess for the TJ-27. I set it manually and it works.