If the recent mess with Palm Profile backups has shown us anything, it’s that you all still want a desktop sync app. We don’t blame you – the cloud is nice until it starts to rain. With that in mind, we thought it time to take a look at the possibilities for a desktop syncing app, especially with respect to your Palm Profile. The question is “how do we get this data from your webOS phone to your computer?”
There are a couple of options, the most obvious being the classic-style Palm Desktop sync. You plug your phone into the computer, hit a button, and sync away. This provides a backup and sync of your data on your desktop, but it locks you into using Palm Desktop.
Given Palm’s emphasis on syncing with the cloud, we think that if there were any chance of there being desktop syncing it would come from the clouds. So that opens up two possibilities: sync to a proprietary app like Palm Desktop, or simply providing open standard feeds like CalDAV. The later would provide Palm an opportunity to flex their open source muscles by helping the WebDAV group expand to support more feeds, such as contacts, memos, and tasks. It would also take the pressure of building a desktop app off Palm’s shoulders – all you would need is any one of several compatible desktop apps to handle the syncing.
Lastly, there’s the Google-esque solution, which would be to provide a way for you to access all of your synced data from the web, through a Palm Profile version of the Google PIM webapps (e.g. Google Contacts, Google Calendar, etc).
So the question we find ourselves pondering is: which would you prefer?
What kind of webOS backup/sync solution do you want?(polls)
