Any true businessperson owns a Blackberry or some form of mobile device that can keep them truly in touch with the outside world whilst they’re on the move. I’m going to be looking at how the Asus N80 performs when I try to sync my Blackberry Bold phone to it, to copy emails and calendar information.
Righty, let’s get started then shall we?
The first stage for me is to actually create some calendar and contact information in Microsoft Outlook. Don’t want to add an email account so I skip that wizard when it pops up. So I add a couple of calendar appointments, a contact (me!), and I also add a task. I’m going to make it clear at this point that I haven’t synchronised my BlackBerry with Outlook before, ever!
Now I have the calendar appointments, etc, it’s time to connect my phone. After plugging the USB cable in I am greeted with the ‘Add New Hardware’ wizard. I choose for Vista to automatically find the driver, which it duly does by connecting to the net.
Right – calendar information created, and BlackBerry connected and installed onto the laptop. It turns out I can’t just sync the two without installing the BlackBerry Connect Manager software – it’s not truly ‘plug ‘n’ play’ then it seems! After a few minutes waiting for it to download, I have it installed and click the ‘Synchronize’ option.
The software gives me the opportunity to sync calendar, contact and task information, and to either just copy from Outlook to my BlackBerry or copy info from my BlackBerry into Outlook too. I have tried both in turn, and synchronising takes about 30secs.
It seems that the Asus N80Vc does not come with any software for synchronisation pre-installed, but either by installing the software which comes with your business phone or downloading a third-party sync application you should find that the laptop is more than capable of handling this. In fact, it seems to have been more than capable of handling nearly anything I’ve been able to throw at it (not literally, of course – I do have to give it back in one piece!).
I’m afraid my time with the N80Vc is nearly up, and so my final blog posts will be in two parts, summing up what I think of the laptop, how well I think it would work for the average Joe Business User, and if it provides value for money.
