Palm Pilots USED to be the bomb

Palm Pilots USED to be the bomb, but now they are a different sort and they are going off. Currently I'm working with a woman who has kept her life journal on her Palm Tungsten E hand held. A couple weeks back her grandchild found it and destroyed it, quite literally. That wouldn't have been too bad but the problem is that we can't get the data from her Palm Desktop calendar to her M.S. Outlook calendar. The file formats are incompatible and Palm hasn't released any conversion programs to convert the information to an industry standard. I've created a backup of the calendar in the Palm proprietary format but I just can't seem to get a program to convert it.

One thing that I have tried is to upload the information onto another Palm that works and then use the Palm -> Outlook conduits to then transfer it to Outlook but the Hotsync Manager keeps crashing when I try to sync the palm using the Outlook conduits.

Anyhow, the longer I work on this the more I'm convinced that I need to warn the world to stay away from Palm portable devices and get something more compatible with the rest of the world, like an iPhone, iTouch or a Blackberry. I have an iPod Touch and a Blackberry and I used to have a Palm Tungsten E as well. The iTouch is by far the best PDA and Blackberry isn't that bad. But Palm is Dead! (Unless they come out with a conversion utility to salvage their calendars. But even that's a far shot.)