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“Life Balance 3.x customers with Macintosh licenses can upgrade to version 4 for just $59.95,” claims Llamagraphics, the purveyor of the fine time management application, Life Balance.

This sounds like a great deal! Until I remember that the only reason I want to upgrade from version 3 to 5 (not 4) is for compatibility with the new iPhone version of Life Balance! So to get them both, I’d be spending:

Compare that to my current cost for Life Balance — which I’m not currently using because my Treo repeatedly made me want to throw it forcefully into the ground (loved the Palm, hated the defective phone!) and the desktop software looks like crap — which I’ve summarized below:

That’s right, folks. After an investment to date of $89.95 in this software, I’d have to shell out another $79.94 to stay current and get the application on the mobile device I currently use. I’d be paying more for the Mac upgrade than I’ve ever paid for any single purchase or upgrade from Llamagraphics in the past!

I’m surprised I’m even thinking about this. However, Life Balance has always made the most sense of any task management application, and has always done the best job of helping me prioritize. (Of other current applications, OmniFocus doesn’t make sense to me, and Things was great for entry but felt horrid at showing me what I needed to do next.) At the cost of Life Balance, despite how it worked for me, maybe it’s simply time to try something else.

The least expensive overall, and perhaps most interesting because it supports task sharing, is to go with Remember The Milk. I’m not sure I want to use a Web or “cloud” service for this, and there’s no desktop application per se, but I’m at the point in my life where sharing to-do’s with others (and outside the work environment) is compelling. The new Remember The Milk iPhone application may tip me in that direction.

I’ve been a Life Balance user for years. I’m not a devoted user but I’ve found it a useful tool in those phases of my life where I felt the need to use an electronic to-do list. The concept behind the application has always just made sense to me, even if using it in practice is not as easy as falling off a log.

I recall that the first time I came across Life Balance, I devoured the Advice Book over lunch at Wendy’s and was excited by the possibilities the application offered. I am pretty sure this was back before there was even a Mac desktop application.

Now there’s finally a major update to the Mac OS X native desktop application. It’s Universal and is supposed to deliver on a lot of long-standing promises, like the addition of AppleScript support. Looking at version 4, it still seems to have its traditional clunky interface, and that’s been a big drawback to me. I simply find it ugly enough that I dread using the desktop application, and the full-featured Palm application feels cramped on my Treo. However, the new version does show some renewed public commitment to the product, which I would have otherwise said was in doubt.

Enter OmniFocus. I have been using it off and on for about a week or two, trying the “vaportrail” sneak peak versions. I’ve been suffering through the daily updates, which are thankfully handled with such great aplomb (probably by the Spark framework) that I hope more applications update themselves the same way in the future.

I love OmniFocus for its native Mac OS X feel. It’s fast, it shares a lot in common with OmniOutliner (which I already use frequently), and it looks like you’d expect a modern Mac OS X application to look. There’s also a good deal on the licensing right now, running until Macworld Expo.

But it still frustrates me. I’m not doing anything complex with OmniFocus, but I keep wishing it was Life Balance. Perhaps it’s because I’m not into the GTD meme; I’ve seen someone say that Life Balance is more Covey-based. But it feels as if Life Balance could do almost anything that OmniFocus could, and yet do more. So I feel that I should look at Life Balance again, especially with the discovery of the new version.

One big Life Balance advantage, from what I have seen so far, is that I can quickly get a flat, prioritized list of what I need to do in any given context. And, I can do that from a hierarchical outline of all of my projects and tasks. I’m having difficultly getting the same output from OmniFocus.

I wish Life Balance would become an application more like OmniFocus, or vice versa. I’d love it if the developers worked together. Sigh.

Now, after class action lawsuits regarding the iPhone’s tie to AT&T, I totally wish I’d sued PalmOne and Sprint about tying the Treo 650 to the Sprint CDMA network.

I wanted it on Verizon Wireless, but it didn’t arrive until almost a year later, in May 2005! During that time, I must have read everything about hacking the Sprint version to run on VZW. The sheer nerve of these companies, to make me waste my time like that! I’m sure many others would have joined with my righteous crusade!

The Macalope, in Always wait for something better. ALWAYS, discusses the iPhone’s “silly pundit zombie talking points that will not die.” This, of course, includes the hue and cry over the lack of GSM 3G networking.

While I really don’t know what the battery life trade-off would have been to put 3G on the iPhone, I do know I would like something faster. (Note: I don’t have an iPhone, so I’m speaking only in generalities.) I’ve had 1x-RTT from Verizon, and it was seriously not cool. Everyone likes faster networking, right? I’m no exception, I’ll admit it.

But realistically, even thought I’ve seen AT&T issue press releases about how many metro areas are covered by 3G equipment, mine isn’t. My dose of reality came on June 29, when I posted Having an EDGE. I looked again, and although my area is slathered in the orange of ubiquitous AT&T signal, the blue of 3G data networking is conspicuously absent, still. Even if I purchased a 3G-capable phone right now at a local AT&T retail outlet, this tells me I wouldn’t get 3G.

So what kind of advantage is that to me, technology columnists? Do you all live in New York and Los Angeles, or other places that have received their AT&T upgrades?

I live in one of the 100 largest metro areas in the country, home to one of AT&T’s top network engineers (I’ve been in one presentation by him), and don’t get that same advantage. I haven’t looked at the entire U.S. coverage map (because you have to zoom down to the city level or below to see 3G coverage), but it would seem awfully silly of AT&T to have as much coverage as I’ve seen them claim, but then bypass my area — as well as the other main metro areas in my whole state.

So if 2G or 2.5G networking is available an ubiquitous in the locale where I’m going to use it most, and I don’t need to depend on having Wi-Fi at my disposal at all times … eh, I’ll take it. The iPhone matches the AT&T network conditions around me. That’s certainly better than nothing, and I’ll remember that as I consider how to replace my current phone.

I did try out a relative’s Verizon Treo 700p, though, and the speediness of the EVDO connection — even in rural Maryland — was readily apparent. However, it still ran through the Blazer browser I loathed in 2005; I’d choose mobile Safari over that any day.

I don’t know if I will get one. I certainly won’t get one until my Verizon Wireless contract has expired … and even then, there are factors to weigh.

But in the meantime, I’ve been staring squinty-eyed at articles about iPhone objections. You know, the ones about how it won’t work in the enterprise because it’s not secure, doesn’t have a firewall, and lacks critical Exchange support. Right now, I don’t know how we can make any evaluation about its security, other than to guess more of its OS has been written by experienced, senior programmers (sworn to secrecy) than the rest of Mac OS X probably is … and that may be a blessing. Given what’s riding on the rollout, hopefully some serious security audits have been done on the code, too.

How does some yahoo columnist trolling for hits know that the phone has no firewall? Do we have proof yet? Why isn’t the lack of open ports good enough in the first place? Do any phones, smart or otherwise, have a firewall?

We have Mary Jo Foley saying that Apple is rumored to be licensing Exchange ActiveSync. On the face of it, enabling Exchange ActiveSync would not suck at all. However, that would certainly muddy the waters for the local iTunes sync to your data, especially if you’re using Sync Services with Entourage (which itself can be connected to Exchange) at the same time.

Also, I fail to see how local iTunes synchronization with Outlook on Windows, for the people that want data from that Exchange client, is not good enough — even though it tends to be for non-BES BlackBerry users.

My request to Microsoft for “Entourage Mobile” would go “pop,” the need fulfilled.

What about remote wipe? I almost forgot! Who is to say that it won’t be available as some option in iTunes later, sort-of like de-authorizing a computer you’ve lost or sold?

And then there are objections about it being expensive — like duh, smartphones aren’t expensive? With their high initial cost, the regular cost of cell phone voice plans that generally start at $40/month, and the data plans that hover around that much, they are pricey items. Hey, I projected that my lousy, half-broken Treo 650 would cost me a minimum of$1700 over the two-year lifetime of my contract — making it the most expensive PDA I’d ever owned. It would have been, too, if I hadn’t cancelled the data plan and consolidated two contracts into a family plan. I doubt I’ve made enough phone calls to justify it, although I write down a lot of funny quotes in the note pad.

Finally, we have the performance objections. EDGE is too slow, they say. AT&T doesn’t have good coverage. This are both true, from what I can tell right now, particularly in the specific areas I might use a phone.

But then again, I cancelled my Treo’s data plan because the equivalent Verizon network was too slow, the browser too annoying (even for the lightweight Google Mobile), and when I was roaming I couldn’t get data anyway — so I’ve already demonstrated my lack of tolerance for that. The addition of Wi-Fi ameliorates many of my concerns. I do agree with Glenn Fleishmann, who would like to see the iPhone data plan bundle connections to AT&T’s Wi-Fi network; I might never actually use that or be within range of one of their hotspots, but it would certainly sweeten the deal.

Half the places I want to use my Treo, I already get bad or non-existent voice service. I miss a high percentage of my inbound calls. This may be due to my phone, which the service department claims is defective, or it may be due to other factors. The point is that my experience with the almighty of Verizon is substandard now, so if I move to something that’s even close to equivalent it’s not going to break me.

Frankly, I don’t need a cell phone. But if I’m going to have one, it seems like the iPhone isn’t a bad choice. At least the software doesn’t look like it’ll drive me mad, like my StarTAC did. The software looks like it’s the most accessible of any phone I’ve seen.

Wow, I was finally able to update the firmware in my Treo 650 using Palm’s instructions for the Mac platform. The last time I tried that, with version 1.04, I gave up in frustration after about five attempts and updated the darned thing with my gaming PC.

This time, I tried the SD Card update method. That didn’t work, so I tried installing it with the HotSync method for version 1.05a. Even though I was using Missing Sync (and thus had to mentally translate their instructions), the process worked.

The update includes a new option to fetch the time zone from the carrier. Before this change, the Treo was apparently only able to get the date and time from the carrier.

Meanwhile, Palm has DST Update for select devices, which I’d already installed and run.

Oh, and Verizon sent me a text message today to let me know I needed to patch my Treo, and that they had DST information for their devices.

I practically collapsed in a fit of laughter, as we were reviewing our DST documentation in the office at that very moment.