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Francesco,
I share your reaction about Outlook.
The interface is badly designed in my opinion, and you have lots of limitations in activesync for note (all notes created on the desktop go to the default mydocuments directory along with a lot of other stuff. yuk!)
But the main reason I don't like it is similar to some other Microsoft software. I guess they try so hard to "simplify" the interface that you really don't know exactly what's happening. It's like when you need technical detail but all you get is broad imprecise laymans language. Or like any bad GUI design that makes you unsure of what the program is doing behind the scenes, or even how and where the data is being stored.
Maybe with time I'll get just as comfortable as I was with the Palm desktop, but somehow I doubt it.
But the good news on PPC is that there are some third party apps that are more straightforward than the Windows Mobile platform itself. Maybe they're converts from Palm programming that wouldn't let go of the zen! I'll share a couple of them in future parts of this article, but for example one is Tombo. In fact, if not for the existance of Pocket Informant and Tombo, I probably would not have wanted to stay on the PPC platform. Tombo is basically a hierarchical list of folders and text notes, and each note is a txt file in a directory. Straight forward, can be worked with on the desktop even if the desktop app is not available, as long as you can see the mydocuments on your pda from your pc. I.e. if activesync is connected. Maybe I could have adjusted to an alternative like Streamliner or Phat notes, but I think I would have hated it. And when you depend on something all day long, you don't want to hate using it!!!!
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