For the last couple of days an increasing number of people were mentioning that they had problems with synce in Ubuntu. After running synce-pls they received the following error:
** (process:6884): WARNING **: synce_info_from_hal: Failed to obtain property pda.pocketpc.iface_address for device /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00: org.freedesktop.Hal.NoSuchProperty: No property pda.pocketpc.iface_address on device with id /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00
process 6884: arguments to dbus_move_error() were incorrect, assertion “(dest) == NULL || !dbus_error_is_set ((dest))” failed in file dbus-errors.c line 278.
This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library.** (process:6884): CRITICAL **: synce_info_from_hal: Failed to obtain property pda.pocketpc.platform for device /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00: org.freedesktop.Hal.NoSuchProperty: No property pda.pocketpc.iface_address on device with id /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00
** Message: Odccm is not running, ignoring
synce-pls: Could not find configuration at path ‘(Default)’
It turned out to be a small error in the libraries that somehow made it into the launchpad repository. Sometimes Murphy just happens to pay a visit 
The problem should be fixed soon, when new packages are uploaded to the repository.
So if you are running Ubuntu and seeing the exact error above, please be patient for some days and try often to see whether there are updates 