Quick Review: Google Sync for the iPhone

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

A few days ago Google finally debuted what I'd been hearing rumors about for a while and had been hoping was true: Google Sync for the iPhone. It enables you to sync your Google calendars (up to five), Google Contacts, and Gmail on your phone via Push technology (an MS Exchange server, basically). While you may be scratching your heads and wondering what's so great about that, let me tell you about how my iPhone & Google Calendar worked before.

Ever since Google launched their calendar application, I have had three calendars on my Google account that I actively maintain: A personal calendar, a work calendar with all of my meetings and milestone/due dates, and a bill calendar to keep track of all of my monthly bills and regular expenses. I also subscribe to Brian's Beer Calendar - his personal brewing schedule so I know when he's making that awesome hefeweizen (hefemärzen) of his.

To sync up all of these calendars, I setup iCal on my Mac to subscribe to all of those calendars (via a private RSS feed) and it would update my iPhone every time I synced. Trouble is that when you do it that way, data only flows one way. I could never make calendar entries on my iPhone because they don't sync backwards to my Google calendars. So, if I had an event that I wanted to put on my Personal calendar or a new meeting that I want to remember, I'd have to use Safari and update my calendar that way when I was on the go, or wait till I got back to my desk and do it on http://google.com/calendar.

With the new Google Sync for the iPhone, I can now have all three of my calendars (plus Brian's Beer Calendar) on my iPhone and add/remove/update events on the fly. It's a great service and it works extremely smoothly.

One tip for anyone who is planning to use it: after you follow the setup process at http://google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html, surf over to http://m.google.com/sync on your iPhone and login to add which calendars you want to sync. By default, only your primary calendar (in my case, just my personal calendar) syncs. You have to tell it which other calendars you also want to sync. Save your settings and check your calendar on your iPhone. It's great. Good job, Google.

P.S. I'm finally moving to Wordpress this weekend or next weekend. I apologize ahead of time for any downtime you may experience.

Technorati Tags: Google Sync, iPhone.

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