Migrating from the Treo to the iPhone 3G was a lot easier than I expected. Thanks to the App Store, I was mostly able to find good (and sometimes great) iPhone alternatives to essential PDA apps that I used on the Treo, with a notable exception.
| App Type | Treo | iPhone |
|---|---|---|
| Note-Taking | DayNotez | Evernote |
| List Management | Bonsai | Appigo Todo + Toodledo.com |
| Password Management | SplashID | SplashID |
| MS Excel Editor | Documents-To-Do | Built-in Viewer (no editor yet) |
| MS Word Editor | Documents-To-Do | Built-in Viewer (no editor yet) |
As you can see, it is important to me that there is desktop and offline access to all of my data.
Evernote a terrific app for note-taking, and I love that there are native clients for Mac, Windows, and the iPhone. I also like the web app, which works great on Linux machines. And most of all, I like that all clients automatically stay in sync with each other via Evernote's web service. The iPhone app is a bit basic right now, and needs two key new features: 1) Editing existing notes (coming in next version) UPDATE: Editing now works in the latest version, and 2) Caching notes so they can be read offline.
Bonsai is a tough app to replace, but I'm becoming a big fan of toodledo.com. There are several list management web apps, but I like toodledo.com for two main reasons: 1) It is extremely fast, and always available, and 2) they provide several easy-to-access export formats that allow me to archive my data should anything happen to their service. I happily subscribe to their $14.95 annual service. There are also several(!) to-do list apps available for the iPhone, but the one I like is called Todo from Appigo. Todo is rock solid, unlike many other iPhone apps, and syncs perfectly with toodledo.com. The only thing it needs is the ability to display sub-tasks, which is coming in a future version.
I was happy to see that SplashData provided an iPhone version of SplashID on the App Store's launch day. The iPhone version works fine, but is a bit rough around the edges compared to the clean Treo/Palm app, and the manual data migration process was flat out clumsy. The sync process is interesting in that it syncs without a conduit directly from the iPhone app to the desktop app, but the sync button is inconveniently buried a couple of menus deep. And unlike the Palm version, the iPhone version insists on navigating the password list via categories, whereas I prefer to just see my accounts listed alphabetically. Luckily, SplashData is actively developing and updating SplashID, so I expect it to mature over the next few months.
The lack of a native Excel and Word doc editor is a real pain, and web-based office suites like Google Docs, Zoho, and Editgrid just don't cut it on the iPhone. Besides, I want my data local, not in the "cloud." I wouldn't be surprised if someone ported Gnumeric and AbiWord to the iPhone soon, and if Microsoft was smart, they'd make their own slimmed down office suite. But in the mean time, I'm using a basic FTP client called Caravan to copy Excel and Word files from my PC to the iPhone. Caravan is a nice little $3 app, with a developer who is actively maintaining it. Alas, the iPhone's built-in Word doc viewer inexplicably refuses to display several of my Word documents, no matter how simple they are.
All in all, I was able to move from the Treo to the iPhone easily, and I find it exciting that we're only seeing hint of the flood of new iPhone apps coming online over the next year.
