And Now For Something (Almost) Completely Identical...

1.2.1 has just been released (a few days after Panther was declared golden master), bringing improved synchronization abilities to Series 60 phones (it syncs the Address Book - including pictures, which is a nice bonus - the Calendar and To Dos). However, it refuses to properly sync real (i.e., snail-mail) street addresses included in Series 60 contacts, which makes it unusable for me - it duplicated all my contacts with street addresses and made copies without that information, which is ridiculous.

Gets Smarts

was in turn bumped to 1.5, getting multiple timezones, custom colors and (hopefully) less crashes. We'll see if it grows on me this time.

Panther System Administration Features

Here's a nice list of new Panther features for system administrators. My favorites are:

  • 802.1X support (we'll see about interoperability, but that's a generic issue)
  • GUI support for IPv6 (I'm going to need it)
  • L2TP/IPSec VPN (PPTP works, but these days the winds blow in other directions)
  • Mail and Contacts Synchronization? Whoa. Not that it will help persuading the corporate powers that be to swap my 3 PCs for a single , but hey, it's nice.
  • Read-Only NTFS support (better than nothing - but I hope it supports compression)
  • DHCP renewal - sure, I know how to do it via the Terminal, but useful buttons are always nice to have...