Psion and Act!: A Marriage of Convenience

Dave Andrews

The new version of Act! for the Psion Series 3A provides powerful contact-management capabilities for the hand-held device. Act! for Psion lets you view and sort your contacts' histories in various ways to get a better overview of your appointment planning. It also lets you create templates for correspondence, such as faxes and thank-you letters. In addition, the program's links to the Windows version keep your contacts and appointments in sync between the Psion and your PC.

Act! for the Psion closely mimics the user interface of Act! 2.0 for Windows and, using a modem or the Psion serial link, you can easily exchange data between your PC and the Psion. Longtime Psion users may find that exporting data from the Psion's integrated dat abase application into Act! will require them to do some data massaging. Furt hermore, because Act! for Psion associates individual appointments with contact files, the program can't import files from the Psion device's built-in Agenda application.

After I'd exported my data from the Psion's Data database into Act! for the Psion, I was able to populate an Act! for Windows database in about two minutes. However, the link between the desktop PC and the hand-held device could be tighter: When you want to add new contacts from the Psion to an existing database on the PC, you first have to do a customized merge (see the screenshot above). In this scenario, the program must copy all the data from the Psion to the desktop before it can determine which contacts are old (and don't need to be copied) and which contacts are new. I find Palm Computing's one-button hot synchronization feature, as seen in the Pilot hand-held device, faster and easier. And Symantec hasn't determined i f it will add a link to Act! for the Macintosh, which I also use.

These small complaints aside, I like Act! for the Psion. It is much more powerful than the Psion's Data program, and it integrates both contact management and appointments seamlessly.

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WHERE TO FIND

Act! for Psion...................$99.95

Symantec Corp.
Cupertino, CA
Phone:    (800) 441-7234 or (503) 334-6054
Fax:      (408) 253-9600
Internet: 
http://www.symantec.com

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Marriage of Convenience

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