01/14/09 Contacts & calendar syncing for free
UPDATE: ignore all this, now google offers direct exchange service for the iPhone (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/calendar-and-contact-syncing-for-iphone.html)
I recently considered getting MobileMe because there was one part of my digital life I just couldn’t quite keep in sync. I had email syncing using IMAP on my various devices, file/photo album syncing using Dropbox, and even note syncing with Evernote. But one thing that always bugged me was I could never quite keep my contacts and calendars in sync. I had some dates in iCal on my work laptop, some in my phone, and some on google. For contacts I pretty much just kept them all in my iPhone and gave up trying to keep them anywhere else.
For me having to plug my phone into my computer and sync iTunes is a poor excuse for syncing. Syncing data should happen automatically, you shouldn’t have to think about it. MobileMe would have gotten me this, but considering the bad reviews and high price tag I couldn’t see getting it. Plus I had Dropbox already which solved my file and photo needs, so I didn’t really care about that functionality.
Today I discovered a perfect way to keep my calendars and contacts in sync and it comes in the form or Microsoft Exchange and a free service called Nuevasync. Basically Nuevasync hooks up your Google contacts and calendars with their exchange server. So you sign up for an account, link it to your google account (or Plaxo if you choose) and have a fully functional exchange link to your data. This makes hooking up your iPhone a breeze since the iPhone now supports exchange servers. Everything works like it should, changes made on the web app show up on the phone and vice versa.
So now that the iPhone and web are talking together how about my work laptop, home laptop, and desktop? This was even easier and I found I didn’t have to install any extra software which I really liked. Apple’s address book app has supported syncing to Google for awhile now so it was easy to get going. In the past Google calendar was always a pain to try and sync with remote software. 2 way syncing wouldn’t work without some crazy daemon that had to run on your computer and you were stuck in read only land. Now thats not the case as they started offering CalDAV support for 2 way syncing and it works perfectly in iCal.
So now I have full syncing between my phone, laptop, desktop, and web app access, which for me is the holy grail of data portability. Hope this helps anyone struggling to setup the same thing.
