Let’s face it, Facebook has become a hub of daily activity for a large number of people, including me. This is specially true for university where birthdays and socials are organised over Facebook and if you’re anywhere as obsessed as me about having an organised calendar, you would have noticed the lack of a true solution to have that information automatically imported in your calendar and more importantly mobile device. This is because most mobile phone sync solutions only allow you to sync one calendar to your phone and while you may be able get an internet calendar running in Outlook you can’t update it on your device. I tried copying event information from internet calendar to local calendar but that would mean doing it periodically and it beats the purpose.

Fortunately, there is a, tricky but working, solution to that problem. In this scenario I’m going to use Outlook, Google Calendar and a Nokia E90.

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I’ve been using Outlook for about two years now. It has done an excellent job at sorting my life out, whether it’s been keeping up with my calendar appointments, making sure my contact details stay upto date or I always have a copy of my current task list. In addition every mobile phone manufacturer supports synchronisation out of the box so setup seems to be relatively painless.

It’s only after the end of the honeymoon do you realise Outlook’s shortcomings. Like most software built by Microsoft, it’s highly functional. But the functionality comes at the cost of bloat. While most people get used to the sluggish nature, you really realise the difference when you try an alternate solution such as Thunderbird for email. Outlook crawls to its knees when using IMAP, presumably because Microsoft wants to push Exchange usage. However this is inexcusable when a relatively newer software like Thunderbird is lightning fast. Scrolling through contacts, adding calendar appointments do seem to have a considerable lag. All of this on a fairly decent machine (2GHz, 2GB Ram).

It’s a shame Outlook has had no real competition in terms of an alternative that would offer the entire PIM solution. Calendar and Contacts are only basic in Thunderbird when compared to that of Outlook. In addition there is no solution for synchronisation between Nokia and Thunderbird. Such a shame considering Nokia is the world’s largest consumer mobile phone manufacturer.

It’s almost a year since Thunderbird branched out as a seperate company and we’ve seen just two alpha releases of Thunderbird 3, which isn’t exactly impressive as their roadmap suggests we should’ve seen a beta release by Q3 and it’s only two weeks ago that a second alpha was released. However all this is secondary as Thunderbird has miles to cover in order to be a true alternative to Outlook. And until that day arrives, Outlook is king and will continue to rest on it’s laurels for a long time. And like all Microsoft’s products, innovation will only start when some real competition starts to kick in.