3. Is That Sync Or Sink?

Following installation the wizard reached the next phase, syncing the laptop's Outlook functions such as Calendar, Contacts and Tasks with TX applications and the Palm Desktop software. Nothing happened. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the handheld's USB cable and turning the unit off and on. No luck.

Finally, after realizing that the laptop hadn't discovered or installed drivers for the TX, I cancelled the sync process against the wizard's strong advice. Then I went through the usual rebooting and connecting and disconnecting of the USB cable required to get a stubborn USB device recognized by Windows XP and the device's drivers installed. After a lot of messing around I got it all to work.

Synchronization happened, but only between Outlook and the handheld. I really didn't care about syncing with the Palm Desktop application. So I didn't bother to figure out why that didn't work even though I had chosen the option to sync both Outlook and Palm Desktop in the software installation wizard.

After setting the proper security parameters I was easily able to connect to my wireless access point. Browsing the web was trouble free and I was also able to lose that pesky USB cable and wirelessly sync the TX with my computer.

I had a little difficulty getting the included VersaMail handheld software to work. It comes with some great presets for commercial e-mail servers like AOL and even a preset for Exchange 2003's RPC over HTTP access. My Exchange server is of the 2000 persuasion. So I couldn't use the RPC over HTTP option. I had to set up what VersaMail calls a "new e-mail account." This refers to an account on the handheld, not on a mail server. After getting by that little bit of confusion, I was able to start creating a new account.

VersaMail can access mail on a server using three popular protocols: POP, IMAP or the Exchange RPC over HTTP option. New account setup defaults to the IMAP protocol, but you have no way of knowing that unless you select the Advanced option far into creating the account and you know that Port 143 is for IMAP e-mail access. I like IMAP and feared that the default was POP and certainly didn't want VersaMail deleting mail on my Exchange server as is the default for the POP protocol.

Once I got VersaMail configured I found it quite easy to use.

That was the last major pothole I encountered setting up the Palm TX. Now let's move on to the fun stuff.