In so doing, I left my Palm Treo 755p behind. And I’m now off the Palm platform for the first time in a decade.  As you might imagine, I had years of contacts and data building up on my Treo.  Critical data which I couldn’t afford to lose and that I had to move over to my new iPhone.  I was worried that this process was going to be full of gaseous pain, but it wasn’t so bad.  Here’s how I moved my data to my iPhone.

1. Sync the Treo with Palm Desktop.  This captures your contacts and calendar data off of the Treo.  In addition, it backups the memos, tasks, and photos.  Contacts and calendar are the most important elements so that’s what I’m going to focus on. 
2. I’m already a Gmail user.  I want to manage all my data with Google contacts and Google calendar.  So…download and install a trial version of CompanionLink for Google.  This will help you get your data from Palm Desktop into Google.  It’s available at http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionlinkforgoogle.html
3. Make some backups before you try the Palm Desktop sync.  Backup your Google contacts and also create .csv backup file of your Palm Desktop data
4. Configure Companion Link for Google for your GMail account, then synchronize.
5. Now that everything is in Google, configure your iPhone to use this data and then use Google Mobile Sync to sync over the air going forward.  Instructions on that are at at http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

That’s pretty much it!

In case you’re wondering (and you’ve been backpacking in Yosemite all week, away from the massive media coverage MacWorld gets), here’s what Apple bored me to tears with on Tuesday.  Warning: you’re bound to encounter some snark in the following paragraphs.

Updates to iPhoto, iMovie, iToasterOven, and iFootRubber

OK, those last two pieces of software don’t really exist.  Actually there’s some cool sounding things in iPhoto and iMovie that are coming out.  I probably won’t find out anytime soon, because the one piece of computer hardware I really wanted to get my hands on – an updated Mac Mini – wasn’t even mentioned at any point in the keynote.

DRM Free iTunes Music

Finally, the music you buy via iTunes can now be legally transferred to whatever device you would like.  You know, what most of us have been doing all along with the mp3’s we’ve been grabbing via Torrent files for years.  Without a doubt, this is another stake in the heart of the music industry as we’ve come to know it, or more to the point…come to hate it. So it will be more interesting to look back at this point in the history a few years from know, after the music industry has had some time to respond.

New 17” MacBook that costs $2799

OK, this was the crazy thing.  We’re in age where netbooks are the rage.  Laptop prices continue to plummet.  Every other person is losing their job.  Folks are looking to cut costs, get more frugal, and buy things using funds from Coinstar machine visits.  So what does Apple do?  They release a $2799 laptop.  For that price I could buy 4 or 5 Acer Aspire Ones and still have money left over to pay an oversees engineer a few hundred bucks to find a way to mesh all of them together for shared processing power.  Such opportunity here for Apple.  Apple could have blown us away with a $500 or $600 netbook.  The thing would have sold like hotcakes. 

Of course, Apple would say that they already have a sub $500 netbook available for purchse.  Its called the iPhone

iPhone

My contract with Sprint is up in May and at that time, and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be dumping my Treo 755 for an iPhone.  Quite honestly, the Spring contract and the $200 it would cost me to get out of it early is the first reason that I don’t have an iPhone already.  The hatred that folks like Holly spew towards their iPhones is a close second reason.  But in spite of what people tell me it about it being a crappy phone, but a wonderful internet appliance…there is just too much innovation happening with the iPhone for me t resist.  Every week someone tells me about a cool iPhone app – like this one from Urbanspoon – that gets me thinking “how can I live without one?”

So what I’m wondering is what will be the state of the iPhone around May.  Will there have been a software update to add things like cut and paste and video recording?  More storage size for all my mp3s?  Or will they have announced the next version…forcing me to hold off for a few more months?  I’m hoping that the events of next weeks MacWorld will shed some light on this.

Netbooks

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about a laptop for the kitchen counter for a few years now.  I’ve had my eyes and ears open to someone looking to dump an old laptop that I could load Ubuntu, connect it to the web to allow me to do some quick email checking, look up a recipe for Ribolitta, or jump over to Amazon to buy a birthday present while I was thinking about.  The kitchen in our house is not only the place where we cook, but its also the command center.  Having access to the vast resources of the web would definitely help.

But something funny happened while I was waiting around for someone to donate me an old junker.  Netbooks became all the range.  If I were a frequent business traveler, there’s no question I would own one of these 7 inch devices.  The age of cloud computing using things like Google Docs and the growing amount of legitimate online entertainment (Hulu, YouTube, Netflix Watch Instantly) having a computer that runs only a web browser increasingly more sense.

What I’ll probably do on this is wait until the second half of the year.  The iPhone with its Safari browser may solve my fetish of having the web at my fingertips at all times.  And as with all tech, waiting will always get you more for your money. 

Mac Mini

This is another device I’ve considered for a long, long time and I’m interested to hear what updates Apple has in store for it at Macworld.  My fascination with it is as a media server that I can stick right next to my Wii in the living room entertainment center.  Haven’t done so in the past because I’ve felt the Mini had some limitations too difficult to be overcome To be on the fast track to my living room, the Mini ideally would have:

• A Blu-Ray drive.  Currently I’ve got a PS3 to play blu-ray films, but wow does the fan on that thing get pretty loud at times.  Would love to be able to use a MacMini for blu-ray discs, dvd discs, Hulu Video, YouTube, and Netflix Watch Instantly
• Optical audio output to handle surround sound
• A killer remote with a scroll wheel.  I’d like to be able to get my iTunes library onto this thing, but need a way of scrolling through the library quickly an easily.  Currently, I hook up my iPod to my entertainment center via a DLO HomeDock.  It works well with the exception of scrolling through the artists and album library.  When you have 60 GB of music, using a down button to page through lists is totally annoying. 

My Next Nikon

Is this the year that I make the leap to the Nikon D300 or D700?  I’ll be paying attention to what Nikon is up to at the Consumer Electronics Show.  If they announce a successor to the D300 that has movie mode, I may have to consider dropping not only my D50, but also my JVC Everio and Flip Ultra.