I've held out for a year. I didn't want the original iPhone for a variety of reasons (mostly to do with the broken Bluetooth support, and partly to do with the lack of 3G). In the past year, there have been five or six incidents where I've said "(*@#^%, I wish I had an iPhone right now, and I'd just ...". Enough. I'm prepared to deal with the baked in limitations of the iPhone and go get one. I'm unsure whether I want to burn half of tomorrow waiting in line, but anyway, time for the questions.

Over the past few years, I've allowed Google to take over my life. That's where I read my email. It's where I keep my calendar (and where my wife also keeps her's, so we can share calendars effortlessly). My contacts are presently in Apple's Address Book on my home computer and are increasingly out of date. (My wife keeps her contacts in an Excel spreadsheet, originally made for our wedding's RSVP list.) Since Google still fails to offer a to-do manager, I've got all of that in Remember The Milk, which even offers a clever browser plug-in to integrate it with Gmail.

I know that the iPhone plays nicely with Gmail via IMAP. The question is how I should manage contacts, calendar, and to-do lists. I suppose I could pony up for MobileMe, but Google's services are free and are (arguably) superior.

I understand that iSync will, once you introduce your computer to an iPhone, sprout some new functionality to sync Address Book with Google's Contacts. Given how much auto-added junk there is in my Google Contacts, this may or may not be a feature.

One tempting tool is Spanning Sync. They deal with the calendar in a way that seems mostly rational, and they deal with contact synchronization in their current beta releases. What's less clear is whether they can deal with three Macs (home, work, laptop) and the iPhone without everything getting all confused.

BusySync knows how to sync calendars, but doesn't know anything about contacts.

What I'd *really* want is to make Google be the center of the universe and sync everything from Google direct to the iPhone and the Macs. I'm assuming, at least for now, that this isn't going to work.

Thoughts? Am I missing something?

I'm quite curious about the answers to these questions as well.

Having everything on Google should be fine. Address Book will sync right to it once you get the phone, and calendars can go both directions if you use one of the sync tools out there. I'd recommend sticking to one that works with the iSync framework, that way it has a better chance of working well with the built in apps, and dealing with the iPhone <-> Mac <-> Google <-> Other Laptop situations. I've used .Mac to sync now for 6 months, and the conflict resolution in iSync works for me decently with the following setup:

Exchange <-> Entourage <-> Work Mac <-> .Mac <-> Home Mac <-> iPhone

I can plug in calendars anywhere in that chain, and iSync is what handles the conflicts for every step except the last bit between Exchange and Entourage.

The advantage MobileMe will have is that you get rid of the multi device chains of syncing, and instead put the "cloud" at the center. The iPhone pulls from the cloud over the air, the Mac pulls over the wire, and the Windows machine does the same too. Currently, there is no way to have Google just push contacts and calendars right to the iPhone, it has to go through a Mac or PC first, and be synced over USB.

Presumably that's exactly what Android will offer once it's released?

Peter

Exactly. The question is whether Google might be cajoled into offering proper iPhone synchronization, or whether they'll be reserving that for Android phones. That would mean I could get the iPhone now and have the other iPhone goodness now (versus god knows how long into the future for an Android phone).

Oh, found one issue that might come up if you are planning on using the phone with Exchange. Turning on Contact and Calendar over the air pushing disables syncing via USB for those pieces. The only way to mix personal and business data on the iPhone is to also subscribe to MobileMe. Then both are pushed over the air.

Devious way to get people to buy into MobileMe.

I've been mulling over the purchase of an iPhone for months, and I'll be waiting to look at Android for the following reasons:

- I want native email conversation view
- I simply can't stand that keyboard - I need a physical keyboard
- My whole life is in Google's apps, and I need wireless syncing of my Google data

It's looking like I won't be going with the iPhone no matter what. Plus, I cannot buy an iPhone for $199 (and I think a whole lot of people can't either). $599 puts it in the same range as most other smartphone out there.

It's funny, once upon a time I would have said the same thing. But I've tried a bunch of different mobile devices with keyboards, including some of the latest and greatest. (Our company develops for mobile devices.) And I can't stand *them* compared to the iPhone/iTouch.

I've been using "Nemus Sync" on my jailbroken iphone. It keeps my google calender synced to my iphone over the air in both directions without any syncs. Hopefully in a couple of days, everything will become clear and official.

I checked the store, it's not in there currently. If it is added, it will have a few limits though. The big one is that it can't run in the background, so it won't be push based. Even Apple's proposed solution that is going live in September wouldn't allow for full push calendar events to automatically pop into the calendar.

Odds are, the Jailbreak community will get into the 2.0 side soon, and also probably tap into how Apple is doing push for MobileMe, and use the same hookups for Google and such.

I can understand that viewpoint too. After all, I seem to be the only person on earth who really liked their 750w. I could fly on that keyboard...

I forget where I read it, but I read that Apple has some kind of event notification service as part of the new iPhone API. The idea is that, while you can't run a background task, you can register for events that will wake you up, giving you much the same functionality. That Nemus Sync looks like it's exactly what I want.

Of course, you have to imagine that Google, themselves, will develop software for the iPhone. The big question is whether they'll port across whatever apps they're developing for the Android phone. Of course, that would reduce people's desire for an Android, but then it would drive more people to Google's network services, which (arguably) is their #1 goal.

Meanwhile, I went this morning to queue up to get an iPhone. I arrived at 8:30am. The store sold out quickly and the rest of us were allowed to order an iPhone via "direct fulfillment", meaning I've already done the paperwork and paid my money. Now I'm just waiting for my phone to show up at the store next week, when I'll (theoretically) get a phone call or email and can just show up and pick it up.

*sigh*

Modest amusement: I got an email this morning from Marware for their new iPhone 3G cases (since I'd previously bought a case from them, it wasn't spam). I click away, and end up looking at a photo of what's clearly a preproduction iPhone with a front-facing camera (presumably for a now-defunct video conferencing app). It's now disappeared from Marware's web site, but I've found the same photo elsewhere.

It looks like a rendered image to me -- i.e. iPhone vapour wear (pun intended), based on being prepared for the case that all the idle speculation saying the new iPhone would have such a feature turns out to be true.

The Marware site is back up, and here's the picture on it:



Looks an awful lot to me like they deliberately added a hole, perhaps based on earlier Apple plans for a camera. What do you suppose the vertical slit is about?

My iTouch has something in the spot for that hole, as does the some iTouch slipcases I've seen. I don't think it's for a camera.

Can you control iPods with an IR remote? Maybe that's where the sensor is.

Vertical slit? You got me.

That is what Apple is adding in September, and it doesn't wake or run the program. It simply allows the OS to change your apps icon and display little numbers on it. The user still has to run the app to get whatever change is trying to be pushed down.



One is the ambient light sensor, and one is the proximity sensor to turn off the display when talking on the phone. No idea why they put the holes in the cases for the iPod touch though.

Ah. The Touch also makes use of the ambient light sensor, it has automatic screen brightness adjustment. That's what the hole must be for.

I think it was Zandr (N6MOD on this BBS) who told me that when discussing that proximity sensor, the multitouch people at Apple were tring to convince the sensor people that the proximity sensor wasn't necessary: "We know what an ear looks like when it touches the screen."

Sync Google directly with iCal now. Instructions here. Go standards.

Is that new ? I thought you could only do a one way sync with Google Calendar and iCal.

Yes, it's new. Google added the CalDAV support in the past few days.

Does that mean that two way sync works on the iPhone now without any extra apps ?

Edit: looks like the answer is a resounding "NO", looks like Apple want to protect their own chargeable service.

Yes, but not over the air. With the Google setup using CalDAV, you will have:

Google <-> iCal <-> iPhone

Similar to the non over air other smartphones have of:

Exchange <-> Outlook <-> Phone

Still, this is a big step forward. Now Google just needs to implement the magic (Exchange?) interface between their service and iPhones.

They haven't exactly rushed to add Exchange syncing functionality for all the other mobile Exchange clients out there.

They have now: http://www.google.com/mobile/default/sync.html

Very interesting. I'd be nervous about Google decimating my carefully constructed contact list, and there doesn't appear to be any way to sync calendars without syncing contacts.

Still, I could back up my contacts, give it a try, and see whether the resulting contact list is over-polluted with Gmail's auto-saved emails, or whether something reasonable happens.

(Methinks I should wait for other people to try it first and see how loud the screams are.)

If they are using Exchange Activesync to talk to the iPhone, the account page will have toggles to turn on/off e-mail, contacts, and calendar independently.

It defaults to on for all 3 (at least here when used with a profile to install), and wipes contacts. So if you do play with this, make sure you have a good backup of contacts on the PC to sync back to the iPhone once you turn off contacts.

I used Google Sync when I had a Blackberry, and it was a lifesaver for me. Then again, I don't mind the "over-polluted" auto-saved contacts list that I get with GMail. It turns out to work pretty well in Android.

Also, it looks like the options for the iPhone are a little sparse. I could have sworn that on the Blackberry version, you could choose to narrow the contacts that get synced to your phone, like only the items in "My Contacts" and not everything in "Suggested contacts."

You can also use www.nuevasync.com who also provide an Exchange interface to Google Calendar and Contacts. They deliberately filter out Google's suggested contacts.

I haven't actually used the contact side of it yet, but the calendar sync works well.

Dragging up an old thread:

I just tried the iPhone ActiveSync support with Google. For my contacts, where I had previously kept a careful list of them in Apple's Address Book and allowed Gmail's contacts to run wild, the result was a mess. For contacts that existed only in my Address Book, they showed up without too much mess at Google. For contacts which exist in both, no phone numbers actually migrated to Google. Had I continued with the active contact sync business, I could well have lost all my phone numbers -- clearly unacceptable.

Luckily, I backed everything up, so restoring my Address Book contents did the right thing. Not having that actively synced with Google isn't really the end of the world for me.

Calendars are another matter. Google is the primary source of my calendar. I configured the "Exchange" synchronization for calendars only, and that seems to work quite well. The only issue, sadly, is that the calendar *colors* don't come through properly from Google Calendar. See, for example, this thread. There seems to be no good way to solve this problem, save jailbreaking your phone and editing a color in a SQLite database.

I haven't attempted any contact syncing for just this reason. I am really waiting until there is still a good solution that will allow Eyrl and I to share synced contacts like we can with shared sync Google calendars.

When I had Exchange syncing to my phone, the contacts were separate from my personal contacts. Though I do use MobileMe, so it may only separate when you have multiple push services, vs syncing via the dock.