I'm about to get a BlackBerry 8520, and am curious to know if there are alternatives on the desktop side to Blackberry's Desktop Manager and MS Outlook.
I'm not really the one to ask. I use Google on my PC too...
And yeah, GoogleSync is available, and IMO is the easiest way to do it.
All you have to do is set it up and forget it.
you can make google a desktop app with Google Gears Gears
Mind you I try everything and always end up back with Outlook, unfortunately Nothing yet has the same features for organizing contacts as well as MS Outlook once you get over 500 Google is really slow to deal with.