Google Sync: Pushes contacts, calendars to your phone

By Josh Lowensohn on 10 February 2009, 2:35pm

On Monday, mobile-phone users, including iPhone owners, got a new way to sync and access information from the cloud. The Google Sync service lets users sync both calendars and contacts from a specified Google account and will send changes over the air -- both ways.

The service uses Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol and, as a result, can actively push changes as soon as they're made. Previously the only way to get this kind of near-instantaneous change was to sync an existing Exchange account with Outlook using Google's other sync utility, Calendar Sync. However, that system doesn't sync contacts and requires users to actively run a software client on a machine that has Outlook running.

Setting up your phone to sync with Google's servers doesn't require any special software, but it's worth noting that, if you have an iPhone or Windows Mobile handset, the process will wipe any existing contacts and calendars from your device. This data loss does not occur on Nokia, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson or Motorola devices. Also, users who haven't already begun using Google's contact manager are encouraged to do so, as, after syncing, it becomes the one place where all of your contacts are stored.

Another small caveat is that the service only currently supports up to five user calendars. Users of Google Calendar may be used to more than that and, consequently, have problems with this solution.

One thing that's missing from the equation is Google's Gmail, which does not offer a push service. Future versions of Google Sync may add that to the equation. Yahoo has offered a free (although occasionally flaky) push service for its Web mail since the iPhone's introduction in early 2007.