Reevaluating Google Sync

I’ve been using Nuevasync for since late 2008 for syncing my Google Apps calendars to my iPhone. At the time, it was one of the few over-the-air syncing solutions for hooking up Google calendars (including Google Apps) to the iPhone. When Google came up with native Google Sync earlier this year, I evaluated it and found that Nuevasync was better. Since then, people have commented on my post about various improvements to Google Sync and it seemed like Google Sync was finally at the point where all my original issues had been fixed. So I had to try Google Sync again.

The steps to move to Google Sync were straightforward:

Backup the iPhone by syncing with iTunes.
Since I use Google Apps, I had to enable syncing for my domain.
Configure Google Sync on the iPhone per the instructions. I chose to delete all contacts and calendar data on the phone since my contacts were already being synced with Google Apps Contacts via iTunes.
I use multiple calendars on my Google Apps Calendar and this requires a weird configuration step via the mobile web interface!

With these changes, the Contacts and Calendar data started syncing over the air. I have Calendar data going back several years (migrated from old Palm to Google) and so it took about 45 minutes for the calendar data to arrive on the phone.

On the Calendar front, I have no issues. I can see multiple calendars. For the invitees on events, despite the iPhone calendar’s limitation, via Google’s hack, I can see attendee information.

On the Contacts front, I did lose birthday information again. However this is because the iTunes sync to Google Contacts doesn’t map the iPhone’s birthday field to Google’s. However for contacts where I had entered the birthday information in Google Contacts, the over-the-air sync did map them back to the iPhone. Contact pictures also sync but again, since the iTunes sync didn’t move them over to Google in the first place, I can only see what was in Google Contacts.

Overall, I’m pleased that Google has fixed the earlier issues and I’ll be using Google Sync full time.

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