Google Sync Brings Over The Air Calendar and Contacts Sync for iPhone
Google just continues to pour it on with sweet iPhone offerings lately. Today’s BIG addition to their list of cool iPhone services is Google Sync for iPhone (Beta, of course) – which lets you do OTA (Over The Air) syncing between your built-in Calendar and Contacts apps and their Google equivalents.
Very good stuff – wireless sync for all your contacts and calendar items. Google is using Microsoft’s Exchange Activesync technology for this, and the best news of all may be that it looks like Gmail sync will be coming soon too! There is already a checkbox for Gmail when you setup Google Sync on the iPhone – we’re just told that it is not supported *yet*. There’s also a lovely little field for setting how many days worth of mail to sync.
I’ve been playing with Google Sync for a little while now, and it’s great. Sync of calendar items is virtually instant in both directions (as in, from iPhone to Google Calendar on the web, and vice versa). Same with Contacts – I just trimmed a bunch of duplicates I’d been meaning to get rid of in the web (Gmail Contacts) interface, and very soon after I open Contacts it shows them gone as well. So far, Contacts seems to need an exit / relaunch at times to see changes – whereas Calendar seems to update on the fly while the app is open.
I hope Gmail push / sync is coming soon. I much prefer Activesync to IMAP. I realize there is at least one other similar app for wireless sync with Google (Nueva Sync) – but I am a big user and fan of several Google apps and just gravitate towards this one more.
If you want to give Google Sync a try check out their Intro page HERE – and be sure to follow their instructions for backing up your data first and then setting up your iPhone. It’s all very easy to follow and well worthwhile …
This is excellent and seems quite spedy to update, but i have found that it is not syncing all my calendars. Has anyone had this problem and or a solution, also no coloured calenders and lastly the month view does not show all the apointments…odd
I hope there’s colored calendars! There is with Nuevasync.com now which rules.
And yes Gmail would put this over the top!
After some digging around I discovered this about setting up the calendars you want to sync…
Sync: Choose Which Calendars to Sync
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Google Sync allows you to choose up to five calendars to synchronize with the Calendar app on your iPhone.
To select which calendars to sync to your iPhone, follow the steps below:
1. Open the Safari browser on your phone and go to http://m.google.com/sync.
2. Sign in with your account and select your phone from the list of devices you’ve set up for Google Sync.
3. Bookmark this page so you can return to it easily.
This got it all going in a flash as well as colours
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/topic.py?topic=13587
cactusjack – thanks for the tip! That worked great for me too ..