Visibility: Xobni is a sidebar for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. With tens of millions of people using Outlook at work and, indeed, spending all day in it, Xobni is constantly in its users’ view. Contrast that with applications like Facebook, which live in a tab in your browser and will be out of view most of the time. (Serendipitiously, widescreen monitors are more popular than ever before, so a sidebar works well).

Ready-to-go: Unlike Facebook, xobni doesn’t need a first-time user to enter profile information, build a network over time by inviting friends, or accumulating wall posts or scraps. Xobni uses as fodder the tons and tons of information that’s already accumulated over the years in your inbox. That means once it’s done indexing, Xobni gets you up and running right away – discovering your network instead of you building it.

Intent-based: Xobni understands how you ‘do’ email. Users don’t view email as a chronological list of tasks at all – they either want to look at email as boxes of tasks (or projects or events), or as a collection of people whom they talk with. Xobni does the latter, and very well. So it’s a cinch looking up attachments from a contact, or the time of day you typically communicate with someone, or schedule time with someone.

Cool: Xobni’s done a terrific job of being viewed as something cool to transform drab old Outlook into. That’s why so many early adopters have turned passionate evangelists.

Do you use Outlook at work? Have you given Xobni a spin? What else (apart from specific features) do you think makes Xobni popular?

Things came to a head Saturday morning, though, when Outlook 2007 took 15 minutes to download 45 pure-text messages, keeping my (admittedly puny 4200rpm) hard drive spinning all the while. Yes, I auto-archive to a separate archive PST every month and de-fragment my hard drive every couple of months, but performance has been terrible from day one. This could not go on.

Moving to Thunderbird is not an easy task. You need to export all your PST to Outlook Express (which takes forever) and then import all of that into Thunderbird (which doesn’t take all that long). I’m pleased with the results, though.

What’s improved?
* Performance has been very good indeed (and we’re talking well over 10000 emails, most of which are in one massive “Archive” folder).
* Spam filtering is much, much better (Outlook had too many false positives and *yet* spam occasionally landed up in my inbox).
* Less UI clutter. Thunderbird’s interface is far more customizable than Outlook’s. The new Ribbon UI in Office 12 is very useful on Word, PowerPoint and Excel, but is just clutter on Outlook. I longed for the Outlook 2003 look all the time – far less clunky.
* Extensibility. I added the GmailUI, Lightning, Nokia Synchronizer and Duplicate Contact Manager extensions immediately.

What have I had to give up?
* Interoperability with Nokia’s PC Suite! That was the *only* reason I stuck with Outlook for so long. Thunderbird’s Nokia Synchronizer can only sync contacts. I need ToDo lists, Calendar events and Notes.
* The Today, Yesterday, Last Week list views. They were incredibly useful, and I hope Thunderbird 3 incorporates that.
* Flagging messages as tasks.
* The ToDo pane, which listed upcoming calendar events and ToDo tasks.

Will post updates in the weeks to come whether the move’s been successful.

However, Outlook is a very important tool for me.

It is the only application (apart from Lotus Notes) that will sync contacts, tasks and events with my Nokia Series60 phone (the N73). I use this feature extensively – Outlook today holds my master calendar and contacts database.

There are a few hacks that sync Thunderbird’s contacts with Nokia’s phones, but none for calendar events and tasks.

Can you, dear reader, suggest a way out? Comment or drop me an email at rahul@rahulgaitonde.org.

Email:
I’ve configured both my Gmail and RahulGaitonde.org POP3 accounts on the phone. The built-in email client does a very good job at retrieving, composing and displaying messages and their attachments. It’s also well integrated with the rest of the system, so I can click on most files and select “Send as email”. I’ve heard that Profimail’s the best email client out there, but i.) it isn’t nearly as integrated as the default mail client, and ii.) it isn’t free! After spending nearly Rs. 13000 for this beast, I’m not spending a paisa more :)

Internet Browsing:
Netfront is a decent browser. It loads reasonably fast, has Javascript support, renders pages quite well, supports SSL. All-in-all, I’m happy. The only thing is, it’s a pretty big application – if you’re running Netfront, you might not be able to open other heavy apps like RealPlayer. According to TaskSpy, while it itself is using 104KB of memory, Netfront (without loading any web page) is taking up 5104KB! I use Netfront and Opera alternately. Both are neck-and-neck in terms of features and usability, but then again, Opera’s only a 14-day evaulation. I don’t see why. Opera is now a free download for Windows and Linux, without the ads, so why not for Series 60? How long before browsers on mobiles outnumber those on desktops? Think issue: Business models for broswer-based ISVs.

In any case, having an Internet browser on your mobile phone is a great timesaver. It takes my bus about 30 minutes to reach my workplace. I use that time to catch up on my personal email, daily news and blogs. By the time I’m at work, I can be productive right away.

The Nokia PC Suite is a wonderful way of connecting to your phone. You can use either the provided data cable, or Infrared (which newer phones such as this one don’t support aynmore), or Bluetooth.

I use the Nokia Phone Browser all the time to manage documents and contacts on my phone, through an Explorer-like interface:

Another fantastic component is the Nokia PC Sync. I can sync my Lotus Notes calendar, address book and TODO list with my phone.

No more typing in stuff into my phone. Simply use Lotus Notes and hit “Synchronise”.

Speaking of not typing in stuff, you can send SMSes via Nokia’s Text Editor. It even integrates with your Address Book.