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Time for Symbian to wake up and pour the PIM?

A smartphone without a proper personal information manager isn't too smart. Microsoft smartphones have Pocket Outlook; Palm smartphones have the Palm Desktop. What does Symbian have? "Not enough!" is the opinion of a leading pundit.

Not many people are more devoted to Symbian than Ewan of AllAboutSymbian - so harsh words from them should cut deep. Here are the harsh words:

"Symbian, in its various UI disguises, ties itself to MS-Outlook as the PIM of ‘choice,’ and because of this, relies on the available public knowledge and API’s. There’s no way that they will know as much about how Outlook works as the programmers in Redmond do," writes forum member Ewan this week.

Ewan  is looking at the problem of making sure the diary data on your PC is the same as on your smartphone: sync. "Synchronising," he summarises, "shouldn’t be difficult, but Symbian have gone out their way to make it appear that it is some mythical holy grail. Information is power, and given the choice, Symbian would not be on my list of machines to choose that would sync to my PIM suite."

His recommendation? "It’s high time that Symbian sat down and wrote their own PIM Suite, so they can get on at least level terms in an area they are weak in. It doesn’t need to be a huge, all singing, all dancing client. A simple Agenda, Contacts, Notes and Tasks Suite would suffice," he insists. "But it needs to be Symbian. Not Nokia, not Sony Ericsson, not Sendo… not any of the partners."

And the discussion has started... have your say there

My opinion: actually, they're right about Symbian. But much as I like Pocket Outlook, on the PC, Outlook is awful: and one of the chief software guys at Palmsource once said, on the record: "Our PIM is crap." So Symbian could usefully heed the word, but it's not going to kill the company to spend a little time analysing the shortcomings of popular PIM software offerings, before jumping in.