Goosync messed up the contacts on my Palm Treo.

I subscribed to Softick PPP to get the connectivity to the Internet through my PC connection that would allow me to sync my calendar and contacts directly between my Palm Treo 700P and google gmail without having to first sync with Outlook.  Cost: $25.

Next I subscribed to Goosync, which would actually do the syncing.  I got the lifetime option.  Cost: almost $55 (they bill in Euros).

I did the sync.  It took about twenty minutes.  Had I known that it would take that long I would have timed it.  My almost 500 contacts in google seemed to have emerged unscathed.  However, my Treo contacts, which are much more difficult to edit (example: you cannot delete multiples, but must delete one at a time) got messed up in many ways without a clear pattern.  I have not had the time or spirit to document the carnage.

In some cases it messed up the simplest of cases such as data in only three non-redundant fields: company name, one phone number, comment.  How do you mess up that?  It duplicated the contact with phone number retaining the parentheses that originally surrounded the area code in one contact and in what is apparently the new version removing the parentheses.  What?  I sent this example to Goosync but they have so far not responded, no doubt staggered by the complexity of the problem.

Goosync  seemed to have created contacts for recent e-mail IDs which were not in contacts at all but had only been used to send a single e-mail message.

Goosync could have prevented this by using one of those techie things.  I think it's called testing.  Why am I testing their product?  Partly because google, which again skates on the sync issue, had not provided the software itself.