I’ve been doing the low-bandwidth mobile thing for the past two months due to travel and had accord­ingly been reserv­ing judg­ment JUST IN CASE that had any­thing at all to do with it. But it really doesn’t. Out­look 2007 is an absolute loser of a prod­uct. No other soft­ware on my com­puter is as vis­i­bly frus­trat­ing or unsta­ble. It’s being used with three POP accounts (all mostly well behaved) and one IMAP store (unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter) that work fine with other clients. This shouldn’t be so hard to get right. I don’t like hav­ing to use web­mail, though at least it’s very good webmail.

These are the sort of nig­gly prob­lems that make OS X look appeal­ing… Mail.app is inte­grated with OS search and all that other stuff so nicely. Cal­en­dars and Con­tacts are no longer com­pellingly bet­ter on Out­look than else­where. In fact, between Sony Eric­s­son and Microsoft, var­i­ous con­tacts in my phone man­aged to get junked because of char­ac­ter encod­ing issues — even when using a lan­guage installed on both phone and sync computer.

Email is a freakin’ ancient tech. Why can’t this just be straight­for­ward, Microsoft?