Since I've been a big cheerleader for the network sync option, I decided to take the opportunity to highlight something that's already been mentioned, but bears repeating.

AFAIK, Palm does not encrypt your data during a network HotSync. Thus, all your personal Palm data travels back and forth to your PC unencrypted. If your Palm and computer are on your local area network at home, that's fine. If your Palm and computer are on a LAN at work, that's slightly less fine. If your computer is on one network, and your Palm is on another contacting it across the Internet, that's not so fine.

Now, what's happening is that your personal data is flying across the Vision network and then the Internet and then your local LAN unencrypted. You may or may not care about that. Someone would have to be monitoring the traffic to find that. So it would either be: someone (employee, contractor, hacker) on the Vision network, someone randomly on the Internet, or someone on "your" network (such as your corporate security types).

Now that PalmOne is a separate software company, we'll see if they address this. Even if they do, it probably won't help us Samsuing SPH-i500 users. They'll probably only support it on OS 5.x and later which has OS-supplied SSL technology. Careful, PalmOne: if you do what's easy, things like Micro$oft or OpenSource Linux will eat your lunch.

So, we'll just wait and see of Palm ever fixes this and encrypts Network Sync traffic, and fixes the DNS name overwrite error. And does it on OS 4.1.

If I really had to bet money, I'd say the future looks like this:
PalmOne Product Marketing is too disconnected from what users want, does not fix either of these, and eventually, say 5 years from now, I'll be running something other than Palm. Hopefully Linux/Java on my phone, with a well supported PDA set of apps and commuinty of third party apps. And they'll be using Linux or Java APIs that I can already program to without learning a new environment! But I fear that 5 years is too soon for that unless Motorola really does something -- but their product marketing types seem more hopelessly lost than Palm's. There's the challenge for Palm and Moto: keep me from ending up on a M$ phone in 5 years.