Personal Background: Gunnar Martz is a student of Indiana University, the department of Recreational Sports. Not only he studies, but also works for his university as a technological assistant. In the university they have a marketing department in which they use mainly Macs. All employees have PDAs, and Gunnar was testing SyncMate out for himself with his MacBook Air.

Victoria Veligodsky: What challenges made you search for this kind of software?

Gunnar Martz: Poor support for the Windows Mobile version of one well-known synchronization tool made me crave for the better solution. Sadly, there were no other options for the Mac OS, but this product only. I had to find something else we could all successfully use.

Victoria Veligodsky: How did first get to know about SyncMate solution?

Gunnar Martz: I actually first read about SyncMate on Lifehacker a few months back. I checked out the Eltima Software blog and was pleasantly surprised by the comments left by readers and decided to give it a spin. The program was faulty at first, but quickly improved once the beta was released.

Victoria Veligodsky: Did you try other products of the same kind before finally choosing Eltima’s SyncMate?

Gunnar Martz: Yes, I tried one very known synchronizing solution for Windows Mobile 5. I tried several times (unsuccessfully) to contact their technical service department. SyncMate Beta never even suffered from the problems I had to contact the that tool’s creators about.

Victoria Veligodsky: Please, describe how you are using our product now.

Gunnar Martz: I am using SyncMate on a personal level. There’s a chance I’ll suggest it to my IT office for a Mac-PDA implementation, but for now, I’m using it mainly to put music on my Samsung Blackjack. I have a bluetooth headset and I like to listen to music from my phone as if it were an iPod… great opportunity! Thanks Eltima!

Victoria Veligodsky: How did you benefit from using SyncMate?

Gunnar Martz: I can plug in my smartphone’s USB cable, queue up a playlist of 100 songs to transfer and go to sleep. When I wake up in the morning, I can rely on the fact that SyncMate got the transferring job done successfully, whereas with the Missing Sync there’d be a pretty good chance that something would have gone wrong.

To say the least, Eltima really delivered on this product. I needed something that could install programs and sync iTunes playlists… the added support for photos and the ability to work on my storage card is more than valuable.