Wednesday, November 23, 2005
OneNote Mobile... man, I wish they had it for the Treo
Chris Pratley had some interesting news about OneNote Mobile on Monday. I guess I never really focused on the OneNote 2003 SP1 feature that they added which synchronized with a Windows Mobile smartphone. With OneNote 12 and OneNote Mobile, you WM people will be able to do two-way sync of a specific section between OneNote and your WM smartphone. You can even take pictures with your smartphone's camera and put them into OneNote. Then the OneNote 12 OCR can make the words in the picture searchable. The same is true of audio recordings (which I've never used), whether you record them on your PC or on your phone. (Searchable audio! This is how you know that you are basically in the future compared to what you knew when you were a kid. Computers have slowly edged closer to my dream of the "song search engine" which indexes the lyrics as sung so you can search by "the wind of mayhem" or whatever song whose lyrics but not title or artist you can think of. (BTW don't search for "the wind of mayhem" please, it is from the song of the same name by Bathory and also includes the line "it brings us curse, lust, hate, damnation and death"))
I am really jealous of the Windows Mobile people now because OneNote Mobile sounds really cool. I have a Treo 650 and I've pretty much resigned myself to be unable to sync it with OneNote until someone writes a third-party utility. And I don't really have my hopes up too high for that, since people who use both OneNote and Treos are probably not enough of a user base to warrant someone writing one. Particularly since Palm SHOT A BULLET IN THE HEART of the Palm OS by announcing the traitorous 700w. Maybe a devoted Treo/OneNote fan will write something to meet their own need and I can leech off of that. I suppose it is far too much to hope that that person is also a TabletPC owner so that they will integrate this utility from the future to allow ink. Wouldn't it be cool to handwrite notes on your Tablet or your Treo and read and edit them on either platform? Then again, you could only write like four words on the tiny Treo screen. Further, there are probably only like 10 OneNote users who use both TabletPCs and Treos. I just checked and Marc Orchant is one, so maybe he can convince someone to right OneNote Mobile for Palm OS.
One thing that wasn't discussed was whether methods other than ActiveSync would be supported to keep the smartphone and PC copies in sync. There probably are none. I think it would be pretty cool if you could sync between a section hosted on a SharePoint site through the smartphone's data connection or through 802.11g. Or if you kept your section on an SD card (which you'd probably have to do anyway, the damn things get so big after awhile) and then passed it between the PC and PDA. Cradling your device to sync it is so 1999.
So, if you use OneNote and a Treo, leave a comment or something and we'll try to convince people to write a sync program / client app to display OneNote sections on a Treo!
--sbreck
Technorati tag(s): OneNote Treo TabletPC Windows Mobile
I am really jealous of the Windows Mobile people now because OneNote Mobile sounds really cool. I have a Treo 650 and I've pretty much resigned myself to be unable to sync it with OneNote until someone writes a third-party utility. And I don't really have my hopes up too high for that, since people who use both OneNote and Treos are probably not enough of a user base to warrant someone writing one. Particularly since Palm SHOT A BULLET IN THE HEART of the Palm OS by announcing the traitorous 700w. Maybe a devoted Treo/OneNote fan will write something to meet their own need and I can leech off of that. I suppose it is far too much to hope that that person is also a TabletPC owner so that they will integrate this utility from the future to allow ink. Wouldn't it be cool to handwrite notes on your Tablet or your Treo and read and edit them on either platform? Then again, you could only write like four words on the tiny Treo screen. Further, there are probably only like 10 OneNote users who use both TabletPCs and Treos. I just checked and Marc Orchant is one, so maybe he can convince someone to right OneNote Mobile for Palm OS.
One thing that wasn't discussed was whether methods other than ActiveSync would be supported to keep the smartphone and PC copies in sync. There probably are none. I think it would be pretty cool if you could sync between a section hosted on a SharePoint site through the smartphone's data connection or through 802.11g. Or if you kept your section on an SD card (which you'd probably have to do anyway, the damn things get so big after awhile) and then passed it between the PC and PDA. Cradling your device to sync it is so 1999.
So, if you use OneNote and a Treo, leave a comment or something and we'll try to convince people to write a sync program / client app to display OneNote sections on a Treo!
--sbreck
Technorati tag(s): OneNote Treo TabletPC Windows Mobile
Labels: OneNote, TabletPC, Treo
# posted by sbreck : 10:56 PM
