google mobile sync - first impressions

After all the posts this week about the new google mobile sync I figured I'd see what the hub-ub was about.  Here's my first impressions:

The good:  Setup is simple with the instructions provided by google.  These instructions can be found here.  After setup the sync with my 1st generation iPhone went smoothly and quickly.  Important to note it will overwrite your contacts and calendars so please take their advise and backup everything before syncing . . . better safe than sorry.

The bad:  For some reason I got some double entires and sync wanted to resolve all conflicts like a good data moderator which took some time.  The double entries were a bit annoying and took about an hour to deal with (that's for about a 200 contact list . . . actual results may vary).

The bottom line:  After initial setup everything seems to be working nicely.  Even the images I've added to the google contacts have synced to the iPhone.  Push updates seem to be as quick as MobileMe.  If google can get exchange working for gmail it will certainly be a great alternative to MobileMe.  As web apps become more powerful and cost effective (the google suite is free) it will become more difficult to sell MobileMe UNLESS Apple enriches the offering . . . I hope they do.  For now, enjoy the new google sync and let us know how your migration went.

Comments

[Adam]

So I'd like to point out that my push test hasn't checked out yet. I created a new contact in gmail which successfully pushed to the iPhone but after deleting the new contact in gmail the update has yet to push to the iPhone after 2 hours. It's a beta.

[Adam]

So I reported back on TDL Live last week that each of my events were being automatically setup with a reminder 10 minutes before the event start time despite setting reminder to None during event creation. This was resolved through Google calendar settings which had by default a notification 10 minutes before the event.

I'm happy to say calendars and contacts are running smoothly.