Replacing a Palm with an iPod touch 64GB

I've used Palm organizers for many years.  With my Palm E2 becoming long in the tooth, I decided to switch platforms and see what all the fuss was about with the iPod touch and the iPhone.

My iPod is a 3G (3rd generation) iPod touch 64GB.  As a replacement for the Palm, it had to to four things exceedingly well: calendar, contacts, to-do, and memos.

Out of the box, as an organizer the iPod wasn't a match for my old Palm.  The Notes application didn't do categories, and the To Do application didn't exist.  The calendar was a bit different, but roughly equivalent.  The Palm calendar has a nice month view where each portion of the days on the calendar is colour coded according to the category of the appointments; the iPod calendar just has a dot on each day where there are appointments, and touching the day will bring up the appointments beneath the calendar.  It doesn't have the same at-a-glance functionality as the Palm, but it works.

Of course, that was before a trip to the App Store.  After trying out many of the to-do and notes apps, I decided to spend some money.  While DoBot ToDos was a nice free to-do app, it didn't have a desktop interface, and was fairly basic.  Similarly, Note Me was a very nice memo app, but without a desktop interface.  Neither had an easy way to import data from my Palm.  I was going to have to shell out a few dollars to get the functionality I needed.

My solution for a To Do app was Toodledo ($3.99).  Toodledo offers a feature rich to-do application that syncs my items wirelessly with my free account at Toodledo.com.  I was able to export my Palm to-do items to a file using Palm Desktop, and then effortlessly import them using Toodledo.com.

To replace my Palm memo application, I chose NoteSpark ($4.99).  Like Toodledo, NoteSpark surpassed the rich functionality of my Palm, and allowed effortless import of my Palm memos.  Notespark also allows wireless syncing of data to a free account at NoteSpark.com, and editing of notes from any web browser.

Thrilled to have to-do and notes functionality exceeding expectations, I then moved on to calendar and contact apps.  Both are built in to the iPod, but neither really shined until I discovered Google Sync.  Using it, I enabled syncing of the iPod Calendar to my Google Calendar, as well as syncing of Gmail contacts to the Contacts app.  Google Sync also allows syncing e-mail to the iPod Mail app, but I find that accessing the mobile version of Gmail through Safari offers more functionality.

So there you have it.  An iPod touch plus $9 of software is capable of matching, or even exceeding, the gold standard for organizers set by Palm.  Of course, the iPod touch goes far beyond that in its capabilities.  In many ways, I've found it to be a laptop replacement.