Susteen DataPilot for MacOS X

First, let me say that the price from Amazon and the delivery from Amazon were all that they were promised to be. However, the software from Susteen/Datapilot left something to be desired. The box delivered from Amazon had old software, version 1.1. I went to Susteen.com to download the latest version, 2.4. I then had to buy another cable, only available from Susteen that brought the price to over $100.00. Then, after backing up the phone data and moving it fom one phone to another, I found that I could not change data anywhere except in the name and number columns. What I wanted to do was to manage my ringtones for each entry and to micromanage my phone's setup features. Neither of these can I do. I finally wrote to Susteen with the following message:"I am truly upset. I spent over $100.00 for the Mac Universal Kit and the new cable for the LG5200 and LG8100 phones. Now I am trying to change the Ringer ID and I am locked out of that function. Why have you done that? OPEN ALL THE IDENTIFYING DATA FOR THE SUPPORTED PHONES. What is wrong with you. Give us a program that works, not one that just does little small things. I can get to Verizon and save my phone data on their website. I don't need your services unless your services are better than theirs."In my opinion, this software is NOT worth the money or the aggrevation.

I ordered the DataPilot Universal kit for OSX; this contains USB adapters for a wide variety of phones. Let me say up front that the one cable I tried (Motorola E815) worked fine; and that DataPilot did recognize my phone at once.The DataPilot software is another matter. My aim was to transfer pictures from a camera phone to the computer (since Verizon provides no other means of doing so except to email the picture to yourself at 25cents each). With what I have spent on the DataPilot I could have emailed more than 300 pictures to myself, and the results would have been just as satisfactory if not more so.DataPilot downloaded my phone's address book data, but it apparently doesn't know about the Categories feature of this phone. I had carefully organized the entries into categories (friends, business, etc) and that information is not downloaded, nor do I see any way to create it on uploading.On to the pictures. When you select Photos, DataPilot shows a list of "albums" initially having only "library" and "trash." You can create more "albums" but these have NO RELATION to iPhoto's albums! The "albums" are created in ~/Documents/DataPilot/Photo/Temp. You can get iPhoto to Import them later.The only option now is to "Read all data from mobile phone." There is NO option to review what pictures are in the phone, nor to look at thumbnails, nor to select which pictures to download. You get all or none. The downloading is EXCRUCIATINGLY SLOW; on a moderately fast (1.25Ghz dual G4) machine it took TWO MINUTES PER PICTURE, or just under an hour to download 25 pictures each 1024x768.You can cancel this process and have only the pictures downloaded so far, but the only way to get the rest is to "Read all data" again, which reads all the pictures including the ones it got before, giving you two copies. And there is no provision for deleting pictures after downloading; you have to do that manually on the phone.I ran this first on a G3 iBook and after downloading all the pictures (one hour!) it hung up, turned on the "beachball" and could not be force-quit. I had to power-off the iBook and from then on, DataPilot claimed it "could not open COM port."This is stupid, user-hostile, badly designed software with questionable reliability. Avoid it if you possibly can. 25 cents per email is probably a more economical way to get pictures out of your phone.

The short version: DataPilot for Mac is pretty much useless. It garbles calendar appointments when transferring to Apple Calendar or Entourage and lacks any form of merging/syncing capability between phone and these tools. It's more expensive than the PC version and customer support is unresponsive. I've returned my copy for a refund (thanks Amazon for making this painless).The long version:I've been looking for a way to synchronize my Entourage calendar with my cell phone (an LG VX6100). Fortunately e2sync does a fine job of bidrectional sync of Entourage contacts and appointments with Apple Address Book and Calendar, so I thought all I needed to do was find something that would bridge the gap to my phone. I'd looked at DataPilot a while back but they didn't support calendar transfer in the Mac version available at the time. The newest version supposedly supports it, and I found it on Amazon for an acceptable price.Data Pilot for Mac comes in only two versions: the software only or the Universal Kit version which includes all the adapters. For some reason Susteen does not offer a Mac version with a specific phone cable. Any way you slice it, the Mac version is more money than the PC version. For the premium, I expected at least equivalent functionality. Not true. The PC version is version 3.11 while the Mac version is 2.2.Installation of the software was uneventful, but I did need to go to the DataPilot web site to download an upgrade to the latest version. Susteen offers free upgrades only for the first 6 months. After that, you need to BUY the new version!The software detected my phone and established a connection, so I proceeded to attempt a calendar transfer. DataPilot doesn't work directly with iSync as one would expect, nor does it sync directly with Entourage or Apple Calendar. To prepare data for transfer to your phone, you need to locate the files and drag them to DataPilot's window. This can be problematic as Apple tucks these away for safekeeping and it's not obvious where they are. I found the calendar files and dropped one on DataPilot's appointment window.This is where problems really began. DataPilot CAN NOT IMPORT MULTIDAY OR REPEATNG APPOINTMENTS! It turns multiday and repeating appointments into single day appointments. I tried this with files from Apple Calendar and Entourage with the same results. (You can successfully move multiday/repeating appointments between Calendar and Entourage.) You can create a multiday or repeating appointment from within DataPilot. However, it apparently uses it's own syntax for multiday and repeating appointments and doesn't understand either Apple Calendar or Entourage formats.To make matters worse, you can not SYNCHRONIZE DataPilot and phone information. A transfer wipes out existing information! You can export info from DataPilot to the phone, but it wipes out the existing data on the phone. This might be expected since it would be up to the phone to do the synchronization. You can import info from the phone, but it wipes out existing DataPilot info! DataPilot should be able to merge phone info with it's existing records then write a fresh set back to the phone. But it would also have to merge (sync) info with Apple Address Book and Calendar (or Entourage) in the process.Better yet, DataPilot for Mac should hook into iSync so you don't have to manually transfer info between your contacts and calendar program and DataPilot. DataPilot could be SIMPLER on the Mac than on the PC.I also have a gripe with Susteen's phone cables. Most other cables advertise that they charge your phone will it's connected to your computer. A caution in the DataPilot manual states that their cables do not charge the phone. Worse yet, you can drain your phone's battery simply by being connected to the cable whether or not it's plugged into your computer!I emailed Susteen tech support with these problems and never heard back from them. Doesn't seem like they take their customer's issues too seriously.