I find I spend a lot of time “on the road”. Its the nature of a “to your door” computer service.

As soon as Computer Aid grew to having more than 1 person running the business, it became obvious that communication would be an important part of making sure everything ran like clockwork.

So for the past 3 years, me and my other half, have struggled with SMS, MYOB, and an awkward way of synchronising calendar and contacts between 2 Palm devices and MYOB…

Except for MYOB, I’ve found switching to a smart phone and google applications was a great solution.

In my case, I’m going with a windows mobile smartphone, but this could work just as well with the iphone, a blackberry, or an Android phone.

The “glue” that hold all this together is Google. I find it amazing that I can enter an appointment on google calendar, and if its a new customer, enter the details on google contacts… then the information quickly finds its way to any smart phone that I’ve setup for this.

On top of that, I can also check my google emails without needing to get to to office to read them.

And of course telephone and SMS are all well integrated, so I just need to lookup a contact, click on the phone number, and I’m dialling them. Quick and easy.

I would never have thought I could do all that, for free, without implementing an awkward outlook server system.

The smartphone also offers many other “features” that I probably won’t use (camera, mp3 player, messenger client, video player, games, spreadsheets, etc

Now I just need to get used to the “quirks” of windows mobile…