Tuesday, January 05, 2010

The always-in-sync question

While we try to get all calendars to share with each other -- a struggle with no end in sight -- progress occurred in another area: how to get a calendar in your pocket that's always in sync with a cloud-based calendar.

Apple's MobileMe for the iPhone was one of the first services offered to make this a reality. But MobileMe costs extra money, and yet it's still not always up and running.

Now here comes Google's Android platform, and at least one (or is that every?) Android phone out there that apparently keeps the local calendar in continuous sync with Google Calendar on the Web, at least according to Tim O'Reilly. Quoting Tim:
"No need to sync address book and calendar. Everything's always up to date."

And unlike MobileMe, there's no extra charge for this.

UPDATE: And as reader John Gordon points out, no Android required here. Just Google Calendar and Google Sync, on any mobile device they already support. Here all this time I didn't realize it!

2 comments:

JGF said...

I've been syncing my iPhone Calendar to my many Google Calendars for months. I use CalDAV.

This is not new.

Anonymous said...

I got my wife a Blackberry for Christmas and an HTC Hero (Android) for myself. I returned the Hero after a few weeks because the phone died and I had problems with the apps, some of which were labelled "alpha". For a company that has apps in beta for years alpha was a bit scary. Still, I can definitely see the promise of Android and will probably get another Android phone in 6 months or so.

The BB has been a different story. I figured what could go wrong? The POTUS uses one. But in many respects its user experience doesn't compare well with the Palm Treo 755p.

Yes, with Google Sync calendars will sync two ways. But when you add events on the phone they are entered under the default calendar. And you don't get color coding for different calendars. Contacts also sync ... in weird ways. It's too late to return the BB now and I'm really looking forward to the BB 5.0 software update. I'm also in the dog house.

My great hope is that Google delivers their own calendar *and* contact clients for BB, just as they have for mail, video & maps.