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Google beta of Sync for mobile contacts & calendar is live

by Michael Rose Feb 9th 2009 at 2:10PM

That thudding sound you're hearing is the head-to-keyboard collision of everyone who, for the purposes of wireless PIM sync to an iPhone, renewed a MobileMe subscription last week. Google announced today that the beta Google Sync for Mobile capability, long a feature on the Blackberry, has now been extended to iPhones (via Microsoft's ActiveSync), and also to other devices that support the SyncML standard. You can sync your Google-side calendar and contacts to your device of choice, free, bidirectionally, starting today.

There are a few caveats with this beta, as one might expect: the main one is that you cannot use the sync capability if you already synchronize with an Exchange account, as there can be only one ActiveSync config on the iPhone or iPod touch at any time. Setting up sync with Google will also nuke your local contacts and calendar on the device, so back up before you proceed. Still, this represents a big step forward in the delicate dance of Google services in cooperation with Apple's mobile gear.

If you configure sync for your device, let us know how it goes! Early comments note that the lack of multiple calendar support is a showstopper -- if that applies to you, check out the NuevaSync option. Update: You can apparently sync up to five calendars to the phone, see here for details.

[via Engadget]

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That thudding sound you're hearing is the head-to-keyboard collision of everyone who, for the purposes of wireless PIM sync to an iPhone,...
 

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hindlist

lets wait and see what happens next?
http://www.hindlist.com

February 20 2009 at 12:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Unknown

I'd point out that this has been working flawlessly with NuevaSync and over-the-air to boot for about a year.

February 20 2009 at 7:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mark

Does anybody know if the new Google Sync can perform the same function as MobileMe when it comes to syncing one calendar between two or more Macs?

February 18 2009 at 8:42 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
doubled

Ok - well, this may not be *perfect*, but, it's a damn sight better than it used to be. I actually use google calendar at work, and just for the calendering bit, it works nicely.

Apple, listen up. Your mobile me service is weak. Please add CalDav support directly to the iphone calendar so we won't have to resort to wacky things like using exchange to synchronize everything.

February 10 2009 at 5:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sodapop

"Setting up sync with Google will also nuke your local contacts and calendar on the device, so back up before you proceed. "

For this reason alone I cannot use this app. My Apple Address Book is my most complete archive of contacts. Google should option to copy my contacts to Google. This one way sync is retarded and unimaginative.

February 10 2009 at 3:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to sodapop's comment
cappuccinoconspiracy

Actually they do if you read the instructions. Sync contacts to google via itunes first.

February 11 2009 at 7:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Martin

I tried to setup sync for my google apps account to no avail... Can someone who succeeded with Sync, iPhone and GFYOD make a small tutorial on what should we enter as parameters to setup Exchange on the iPhone?
I was succesful with my regular gmail account, but could not make it work with my Google Apps account, which is the only one I use really...

Thanks!

February 10 2009 at 8:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David

This is great!

I'm just in the middle of trying to convince my boss to migrate from excahgne to google apps for your domain and this (apart from push not working yet) has just fixed the only problem!

I have set this all up to sync from my personal GAFYD account and all works fine, except loads of square symbols are added between my contacts first and lastname and after the lastname in place of spaces...

eg:

Joe⃞⃞Bloggs⃞⃞

Did anyone else get this problem?

February 10 2009 at 6:41 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to David's comment
David

Solved my own problem: (from Spanning Sync website)

Note: If you see unwanted X's in your contacts when using Google Sync and Spanning sync together, you need to switch to Spanning Sync's Gmail compatibility mode:
Open the Spanning Sync pref pane
In the Contacts tab, uncheck and then re-check the "Sync contacts" checkbox
Choose "Preserve Gmail compatibility" and click "OK"
Make some small change to any contact in Address Book to force a "push" sync
After syncing with Spanning Sync and with Google Sync, the X's should be gone

February 10 2009 at 11:25 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Flunky Carter

Does anyone know how to get iCal to sync its existing calendars to Google?

February 09 2009 at 9:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Flunky Carter's comment
Alexander

As far as I can tell, you have to export each calendar in iCal, then import it into Google Calendar to setup a new Google Calendar (or combine them into one).

February 10 2009 at 12:25 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Flunky Carter

Will this process, in turn, keep them synced up in the future?

February 10 2009 at 12:34 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Alexander

Works great except iCal won't accept Outlook invites into a Google calendar. I was able to accept Outlook invites and put them into one of the local iCal calendars before.

Any workaround for this?

Also, how do you make a local backup of the Google calendar in iCal?

February 09 2009 at 6:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
schmzingm00z

Googles contact management is still week. You have to sync all or nothing, no choosing which contacts or groups tp sync. Also, every time you send an email, a contact is created, and according to Google there is no way to disable this. I send a lot of one time emails to people, who I do not want to appear / clutter up my contacts with..

February 09 2009 at 5:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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