iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I am loving Google Sync for my iPhone!

Google recently announced their Google Sync service for the iPhone. The highlights are it leverages the great Google Mail (plus Contacts) and Calendar services with the best sync/push protocol out there: Microsoft’s Active Sync.

At work, Brock University, migrating our small department to MS Exchange has been an option for a while, however I’ve been waiting to recommend it until the labour and confusion involved in the transition would balance-off the benefit. Now that essentially the same service has come to the rest of my life once I had it working I immediately started trying to get my wife to add it to her iPod touch!

The value of Google Sync is all of those features that the corporate world has been using over the last decade can now be enjoyed by us promiscuous web users with the ubiquitous web tools Google has developed — a big class silo that anyone can jump into and radiate out of, unlike corporate Exchange systems.

Not only do I have all my Google calendars, contacts and all of my E-Mail in my pocket but I can also get new items instantly added to my calendar.

I installed it today after waiting a few todays to confirm that all the buzz was positive. Here’s the positive experiences I’ve had today:

1. I was mid-way through writing an E-Mail on my iPhone when I realized I had an old address for someone. I then quickly looked up on my desktop the person’s new address on Facebook and changed it in my address book. I then picked my iPhone back up and it was ready to auto-complete the new address — without even having to open an close Mail on the iPhone!
2. My wife and I keep a common calendar on Google Calendar so we know where we need to go on which weekends: Now we’ve got that common information everywhere we go — soon we’ll never have to speak to each other again!

Google Sync brings the benefits of corporate Exchange/BlankBerry culture to us socially promiscuous web hipsters.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 16:46 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.