Caveat: Oh dear, I hope I won't come across as bitter and overmuch derogatory. I really don't mean to...
I carry a lot of customers info on my Palm address book and can not afford to have a word missing and must have access to all that info on my phone. Do you think I would be dealing with problems migrating to an android phone?
Long story short:
Yes, you'll have a frustratingly diminished feature set (but with more bling). I still keep my Treo in my jacket pocket so that I can work on the stuff that Android can't do. It is a strange impression that the most modern stuff is 10 years behind PalmOS.
How is it that the Android address book does not sync everything from Gmail contacts? Are you saying that you don't have all your contacts info on your phone? Whats the use then?
Well,
all my contacts sync from GMail to my phone (there's an option to only sync some groups, but I've selected "Sync All" which I suppose is the norm). The problem is that a contact in GMail has a lot of fields, but only
most of them are included in the sync to Android; for instance (my favourite example), the
Birthday and
Anniversary fields are skipped. You will have a lot of work getting your contacts from Palm Desktop into GMail; my ~200 contacts cost me a couple of evenings' worth of CSV file twiddling (and I can't get my Galaxy to serve birthday reminders). (More info on this topic available upon request.)
Add to that that (at least for v1.5 Cupcake), there is a
very limited capability to
search for info. That is to say, if you for instance keep a per-contact journal, or order numbers, in the contacts'
Notes field, you can't retrieve a certain record by searching for something you know appears in its
Notes field -- you can only search by full name and phone number, or manually navigate to it (ie. by name). Bummer!
Although, in regard to my last parenthesis, v1.6 Donut is
supposed to have much-improved local search; the feature sounds like they are getting closer to what Palm did a decade ago
. Still, the search feature is only half the solution as the individual applications must provide the search results, and I haven't found anything mentioning improved search in the Google apps.
In the end, I am cautiously optimistic, but try to maintain extreme patience. And use my Treo in the meantime...