I’ve played around with Google’s new sync services for a few days now, and mostly it works well. Since I use Google Apps instead of regular Gmail I had to go into my administrator panel and turn it on first, then reload the mobile page a few times to get it to work. I’ve found three problems so far, two of which I’ve solved.
- Junk contacts from Gmail. When I synced I had a lot of people in my list I didn’t want. I did some pruning and this is fine now, but even when you tell it not so Gmail likes to add contacts on its own, so we’ll see how that plays out long term.
- When you enable over-the-air syncing on your phone, iTunes no longer syncs back to your computer’s iCal and Address Book. For iCal, you can use their CalDav support to get iCal to sync up on its own. My calendar needs are pretty simple so this works fine for me, but BusySync is I’m told a good utility for improving this.
- What I can’t figure out how to do is keep Address Book on my Mac updated. iTunes doesn’t pull that data down from the phone anymore, so I’ll be left having to remember when I type a new address or phone number in my phone to also do it on my computer.
So basically I’m left with less than what I had before. I can use iCal and Google Calendar, but I could do that before with CalDAV. Now my Google Contacts stay up-to-date, but Gmail already knows people’s email addresses, and for anything else my phone is where I need them.