Palm has released the non-beta version of ACCESS Palm Desktop 6.2 for Windows. This is long awaited news for Windows Vista customers who, for the better part of a year, have had to jump through hoops to get the Palm OS devices to sync with the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Before you download and install Palm Desktop by ACCESS, there are a few things you should keep in mind, as this is not the Palm Desktop that you are used to.
1. Palm Desktop 6.2 now works with all Palm OS devices running Palm OS 3.5 and later.
2. ACCESS has added an option to only install the HotSync Manager. Palm Desktop is no longer required.
3. The Palm Quick Install tool has been replaced by the Install Tool. Windows Vista customers will now be able to HotSync Palm OS applications (.prc files) and database files (.pdb) to their devices.
4. Microsoft Outlook 2007 is supported as a Personal Information Manager (PIM) application.
5. Since this application was developed by ACCESS, some things are not the same. The features that are no longer available are:
- Palm Quick Install tool has been removed (and replaced by the Install Tool)
- The VersaMail HotSync conduit is no longer available for USB cable HotSyncing.
- The Birthday and Anniversary fields on your device will not sync to Palm Desktop. (This didn’t work on previous versions of Palm Desktop either.)
- Color coding in the Calendar application no longer works.
- 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows is not supported.
Additionally, Palm warns on their website, that you check with software developers to make sure that their HotSync conduits are compatible with the new version of the HotSync Manager. Palm also notes that Palm Desktop 6.2 is not compatible with computers that have 2 or more CPUs in them. This is not the same thing as a single CPU with two processing engines, or “Cores” as they are often referred to.
So, for example, if you have a PC that has an Intel Core2 Duo processor, Palm Desktop will work just fine. If you have a PC with two Intel Core2 Duo processor, Palm is warning that Palm Desktop 6.2 won’t work.
For more information, and the download directions, visit the Palm website.
3 Comments
Anonymous
What? Still no Vista64 support? They’ve got to be kidding.. This is the reason I abandoned Palm and WM. Sure WM is kludgy and slow, but at least it works and syncs.
Alan Grassia, Staff Writer
Regardless of who is responsible for writing a 64-bit Windows XP and Vista version of Palm Desktop/HotSync Manager or a 64-bit version of the USB driver, the simple fact remains that to date, 64-bit Windows is not supported.(Would now be a bad time to mention that Palm Desktop for the Mac is 64-bit compatible?)Alan G
Anonymous
I tried the 6.2 desktop by Access and was disappointed to find it was no longer possible to create a recurring task! I quickly uninstalled it and went back the original desktop. Wish they had mentioned this.