Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I’ve had Yahoo! Go on my phone for a while now, trying it out for syncing my address book and calendar in particular. But I’ve been having a bunch of trouble with it. Today it’s refusing to sync a calendar entry that I added earlier this morning. The entry is on my calendar online, but it’s not appearing on my phone. So maybe I’ll use the app every once in a while to push my calendar and contacts online, but it’s not working for syncing. Here’s the breakdown, for anyone at Yahoo who might be interested in a list of gripes:

• It’s too big for the memory profile of the phones you’ve chosen. If I’m running just about anything from the Yahoo Go suite I can’t take a picture with my phone. Because Go really wants to keep itself up and running all this time this is very annoying.
• The initial options for setup are hidden. When I reinstall the app there is no setup for username and password. You need to hit one of the icons on the Go screen to get into the setup dialog. Why completely hide this? It’s just confusing for folks who are familiar with the app and think they know what to expect.
• It’s not “just working” for the calendar stuff at least. Why aren’t my entries from online getting pulled down to the phone? I have no idea, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing to give me additional info. The transfer says it worked, if I add a test entry from my phone it shows up online. But not vice versa.
• I want a simple “manual sync now” option. The “manual” option allows me to set options when to sync myself, not explicitly request syncs directly.
• The inter-application communication could really use some work. The tool seems to be structured as a set of apps that try to communicate with each other. And if you try to set options in one app and then go check on another, the status isn’t synced up fast enough. Sometimes I would go into Go and set an option, and then go to the connection app and check on the status only to find my recent changes weren’t reflected. So I’m stuck killing everything off, starting up Go to set options, and launching Connect just to make sure my tests are really running with the options expected.
• Along those same lines, having the options within the Go app be dependent on if Connect is running or not is problematic. First of all it’s just confusing to change options in one apps softkey menus based on if another app is running. Second, what if I want to change my filter options BEFORE I start to connect? I launch connect and it connects when it hasn’t been up for a while. Put that filter options dialog in the Go app itself and allow it to be used without Connect running.

So for now, unfortunately, Go just doesn’t work out for me. I have it disabled, and given how much of a pain doing a manual sync is I probably won’t use it. Can’t wait for the next release though. I would love to use the app, it’s just currently too much pain to do so.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 10:12 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.