Apparenly Vista beta 2 had a nice feature that is supposed to take the place of ActiveSync: the Windows Mobile Device Center. Daniel Moth wrote a few posts about it in the past (here and here), but in RC 1 it’s gone — of course Daniel works for Microsoft these days, so he might not even be aware that the program is not available to us ordinary Vista users :-)
The good news is it’s pretty easy to get the application back. These instructions detail how a registry key has to be created to make Vista find an update all of a sudden that contains the Windows Mobile Device Center. Great — and it works just fine with my i-mate SP5, so I’m not complaining.