Native BB Task Manager Design

I've been poking around the old threads and I found a thread that was critical of the lack of a start date feature, which is quite a departure from how outlook deals with tasks. It's funny because Blackberry tasks and outlook are supposed to sync but cannot sync the start dates. So, my question is this: why do you posit BlackBerry designed it this way with no start dates? Is it purely because they expect them to use the calendar integration to view tasks anyway and the presence of start dates would look too close to what an appointment would look like on the calendar? Or do you think it's for another reason. For those of you who rely on start dates in your personal organization systems, how do you design your tasks to work around no start dates? What I've been doing for long projects is making the due date the start date, then setting an alarm in the calendar when the task is due, but I'm open to alternative suggestions!

That would be for some more serious project management. I'm not sure anyone else has a "start date" concept on their task list. But at least BB7 has an 'in progress ' status, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know if that would sync properly.