New Year, Fresh Start: Updating Your Address Book

I'm among the dozen or so people left in the US who don't have a smartphone. My iPod is the Classic model, not the Touch, so no super cool apps to play with there. But my laptop is my lifeline - it's where my main calendar and address book are.

Over the years, and through several operating system upgrades, and new computers, my address book has become cluttered with outdated, or totally irrelevant entries. Things from back in the Late Jurassic, when my husband and I both shared ye olde iMac Flat Panel and sync'd our Palm PDAs to it. So, it was time for a purge.

I set basic ground rules as follows:

* Delete all work contacts of my husband's that had ended up sync'ing to my account one time back in '03 and had never been removed.

* Delete any people I haven't heard from in a year.

* Update the keepers with email, mobile phone info, and family names. I love that feature in OS X Address Book - I can even create a special category for friends' pets. Since I volunteer for a Rottweiler rescue, it's not as bananas as it sounds at first blush. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

* Add in all the new friends from the past year whose info has been stored in other places. Match cellphone entries with Address Book entries manually. Because Verizon sucks, and my LG phone won't sync with my computer automagically.

* Realize I'm not as much of a misanthrope as might have been indicated by the previously mentioned purges.

I'm still waiting for the right all-in-one solution to have a more portable version of a calendar and contacts than my giant 17" aluminum tabletop, but I can't get past the expense of the data plans for an iPhone. The iPod Touch is too small to be a good eReader, and doesn't hold as much stuff as my Classic. I've considered the Nook Tablet as a possible Android contender, but the sync issue comes up with iCal. Try as I might, I still haven't been able to get Google Calendars to sync properly - things get randomly left out, which leaves me manually checking things anyway. Not exactly time saving, or convenient.