For new Pylon users, having this sort of problem when they aren't familiar with the software and maybe not with the Palm either isn't going to be too encouraging for them, I think. I spoke with iAnywhere Technical Support about this issue, and even after several email exchanges, they seemed a bit stumped. However, during the period of writing this review, they issued a patch version -- 5.2.3 -- to fix an issue I found.

With 5.2.3, while these hangs haven't gone away, they don't seem to happen so often or to cause the Palm crashes.

Now let's look at the syncs in detail.

Calendar
The major issue here is one of time zones -- but this isn't anything new in Pylon 5.2.2. Palm's Calendar isn't time zone aware. While it might appear that the Palm is, in that the World Clock allows you to reset the Palm to another time zone, that has no effect on the Palm calendar. There just isn't any time zone info on a Palm calendar entry.

Pylon syncs calendar entries from Notes in terms of the time zone in effect in Notes at the time. For example, say, you have Notes running in GMT, for the UK, and a meeting arranged at 12:00 GMT today, and one at 13:00 CET in Amsterdam tomorrow. These are actually at the same absolute time, 12:00 GMT, on the different days. When you sync to the Palm, from Notes running in GMT, these will both appear at 12:00. Move Notes to CET, and the time of both in the Palm after a sync moves to 13:00. For those of you that don't travel across time zones, this won't be a problem. Those of you who do, be aware. For things that really matter -- flights, for example -- I bottle out and put the actual time in the time zone where the thing will happen in the calendar entry subject.

Address Book
One thing that has always bugged me with Pylon is that the Notes email address in the Personal address book, field MailAddress, does not sync properly with the Palm's Email address field. What actually happens is that the Palm field content is written to the Notes field CellPhoneNumber, and the field header for that is altered to say "E-Mail" in field PhoneLabel5. I tried playing with the field mapping, by entering data in each field in Notes and the Palm, and seeing what appeared where on the other.

This seemed to show that the Palm's default Email entry (but note that this is a 'soft' or reconfigurable field) is the "Phone 4" field on the Address Book filter. So I mapped that field to MailAddress, but this approach was not totally useful. Pylon failed to copy any email address at all from Palm to Notes, and duplicated the Notes email address on the Palm with both "Email" and "Mobile" literals. I went back to the standard configuration.

I'm not sure that iAnywhere can fix this completely and solidly. I'm sure that they could create a mapping that properly maps the Notes MailAddress field to the Palm, but there will always be the issue that the Palm phone, email and custom fields are soft; that is, they can be reconfigured with different literals to mean different things, just as they can in Notes.