Good points, Ti Guy. I'm in the somewhat unique position that I have little need for a cell phone so Bluetooth and I aren't bosom buddies nor do I need to share calendars. So I guess I was speaking more to things like email filtering and basic calendar functionality. If you're looking for integration, a strong case can be made for Apple's offerings.

Chris

In OS9, I was using Outlook Express for mail and Palm Desktop for calendar and contacts.

It was natural to move to Entourage for mail. I love it, but I do agree that the spam filter is not very intelligent (OK, it sucks).

I tried to use the calendar and contacts in Entourage, but every time I do, I end up wishing that it acted like Palm Desktop, which I still think is #1 for features, labels (color coding) and ease of use.

Well, Entourage does have automatic spam filtering, just not a learning filter like Apple's. I admit Entourage's filters are much more powerful. However, I could never find an efficient way to create a combined Inbox like Mail does. I created a view, but I found it was much too slow (which I can't explain) to be used efficiently.

There are some other things that I dislike about iCal and how it handles reminders. With Entourage, you get three buttons in the reminder (Open Item, Snooze, and Dismiss). These buttons give you much more flexibility in how you deal with reminders. Open Item allows you to run Entourage and open the event's record in one step so that you can go in and edit it if you want to. Snooze lets you tell the program to temporarily dismiss the reminder and then bring it back at a later time. (I just wish that MS would add an option to all you to enter a custom snooze time instead of having to always select one from their list of times.) Dismiss allows you to dismiss either the individual reminder or an entire series (if applicable). Choosing snooze or manually changing the reminder time in Entourage and saving both automatically close the reminder window. In order to do any of these functions in iCal, you have to manually open the iCal and the specific reminder and then edit it. Setting the reminder to a later time does not automatically close the reminder window. You have to also do that manually after you have reset the reminder time.

Because of these reasons and the one Duke_Thomas gave, I eventually went back to Entourage for my scheduling needs.