Starting today, you can wirelessly sync your contacts and calendars from Gmail and Google Apps with the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. A number of third-party providers already offered similar sync capabilities, but now, Google itself can automatically push calendar and address book changes directly to these phones. In typical Google fashion, this new product is released as a beta, and there are still a few knownproblems, but in our own tests, the push sync worked just as advertised.
Google Sync was already available for Blackberry users and you could already sync your Gmail contacts on the iPhone through iTunes. This, however, was relatively inconvenient and Google surely heard a lot of complaints from business users who needed more ‘Outlook-like’ capabilities on their phones.
The new sync capabilities are also available for any other phone that supports the SyncML standard.
Some Problems
One problem with this new system is that it will replace all your existing contacts on your phone with your Gmail contacts, which might be a deal breaker for some. Another deal breaker might be the fact that you can only configure one Active Sync account on the iPhone, which would be a problem for those of us who maintain more than one calendar (one private – one for work) and would like to use push for all of those.
Also, your Gmail contact list might a lot messier than you have realized, and it might take some work to manually recreate your current address book in Gmail.
Gmail Push Coming Soon?
Interestingly, Google now uses Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol to push updates wirelessly to the phone, which leads us to believe that enabling push email is the next logical step for Google. Chances are that Google is testing its infrastructure by only supporting ActiveSync for calendars and contacts first, and that it will release support for push email in the near future.
