Syncing

Keeping in sync sucks.

I’m not talking about keeping in sync with fashion, current events or even real life. I’m talking about having a stationary computer, a laptop and a smartphone where everyone has notes, calendars and contacts that you want to keep in sync.

My main wish right now is that I could have my calendars in sync. I want to be able to add and edit events on all three devices and have all three devices more or less automatically updated.

Now there is one marvelous feature that comes from the Apple company and that is called MobileMe. It syncs calendars, contacts, mail – even passwords you save on different devices and check this: third party application data and preferences! That is fucking awesome. But it is also fucking expensive, it’s $99 a year, which really isn’t all that much, it’s just that I’m piss poor.

So what to do when you’re cheap? I figured someone must have figured out a solution, and I recently thought I had found it. Google just recently made CalDAV available with their calendars, meaning you could sync online without having to go to the google calendar site. And i gotta tell you it works really awesomely well! I’ve set up both my iCal calendars (on both computers) with CalDAV to gCal. It just works.

But now the iPhone won’t sync properly. Since for some reason (I’ve been told) the iPhone doesn’t fully support CalDAV, I can’t edit or add events to the gCal calendar, hence all changes I make on the phone are just synced to the computer I choose to sync it with. So I’m kind of back to square one, if the phone calendar doesn’t work to edit or add I’m pretty much crippled.

I then tried NuevaSync, a marvelous free service that provides over-the-air sync with google calendar. But I pay by the MB for network traffic that’s on the 3G/EDGE band (and it is highly likely I won’t have access to Wi-Fi every time I wan’t to edit my calendar) and one simple small sync was 6kB, not acceptable.

So what do I do? Pay the 99 bucks a year?