jstan,
I am not so sure that it is the smart phones that are stupid. BCM's limited
design feature set has been lagging in this ability for far too many years.
It is almost like the designers think the BCM contact data base only needs to
be a stand alone, lonely isolated island unto itself with no relating to it
from the outside world.
A word of caution. I have not examined the (currently beta) next version of
BCM for WM5 but I believe that it syncs your BCM contact data into an
entirely separate application on the handheld for viewing and editing only.
The ability to quick look up and dial or to have the Contact info appear as a
caller ID was still not a functioning feature. This omission is truly
"stupid" and not the fault of the mobile device. To compare apples to apples
make a note that the Chapura Pocket Mirror Professional solution syncs ALL of
your various Outlook and BCM contacts into the SAME (only 1) place on the
handheld device. The dialing, lookup, and caller ID works uniformly on the
device for ALL synced contacts from both the native Outlook pst AND from the
BCM Business Contact folder.
The only other next hassle I foresee is whether or not by the time this BCM
for WM is released ("soon") it will support WM6 in addition to WM5. WM6 is
now the current version that new WM devices sold will be using in 2007.
Hopefully, there will be a proactive coordination of this by MS. If past
history is any judge however, it will likely take the Redmond bureaucracy
another year to not anticipate and respond to this reactively with their next
WM sync solution release.
-THP
