How to sync iPhone to Google Contacts and Calendar
About a year ago, I moved my contact list and calendar into Google Contact List and Google Calendar. That has proven to be a good thing because it gave me a way to get organized and have one "master list". At the time, I knew that it would be inconvenient to not have access to the information when I'm away from the computer but I figured I could find ways to deal with that as I went along. In fact, getting an iPhone has proven to be a huge step forward.
The key is Google Sync, a free service from Google that allows you to synchronize your contacts and calendar with a number of smartphone models, including iPhone. Oddly enough, Google Sync uses the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol, so you end up with Apple talking to Google using a Microsoft language. Who would have thought that Redmond would provide the common language for those two? Go figure.
The process is simple. I went to the Google Sync home page, selected"iPhone" from the "Choose your phone" dropdown, and followed the instructions.
Before you begin, make sure you know which iPhone OS version you have so that you can follow the correct instructions. You can find out by going to Settings > General > About. The Version is near the bottom of the screen.This is critically important if you are still running iPhone OS 2.0. As you will see in the next step, that iPhone software deletes the existing contacts and calendar and replaces them with what it gets from Google. So, if you have the older software, you need to follow the instructions to move the information from the iPhone into iTunes, and then from iTunes into Google. Once that's done, Google will match what's on the iPhone already, and you will not loose anything when you do the first sync.
If you are running iPhone OS 3.0, then you don't need to move the information from iTunes to Google. It is enough to have a copy of your contacts and calendar in iTunes, just in case something goes wrong with the next step. In that case, you can restore the iPhone using the copy in iTunes.
The second step is to set up your iPhone to use Google Sync. This is where you tell the iPhone to connect to Google using your username and password.
Be sure to pay attention to the part where it says "Unless you want to delete all the existing Contacts and Calendars on your phone, select the Keep on my iPhone option when prompted." Loosely translated, that means if you click the wrong button, you will blow away the information on your phone. I'm notorious for clicking on dialogs as fast as I can, but in this case, it pays to slow down and reflect for a moment. I suppose they tell you to backup your data in step one because so many people suffer from the same click-before-thinking disorder as I do.
That's it. Now that I've done this, everything on my iPhone appears in Google and vice versa. Changes and deletions go across as well. As far as I can tell, none of the information I care about gets lost along the way. Still, you should pay special attention to make sure nothing you care about gets translated incorrectly.
Google suggests the last step is to "learn about options and features". I would suggest that you pay special attention to the known limitations to make sure they aren't going to affect you.
One final word: Be Careful! I have not tried the setup when I had data on the phone, so I can't say first hand if that first sync keeps everything. I tried to convince my sister-in-law to try it, but she was too protective of the information on her iPhone. Honestly, I can't blame her; she has a lot of irreplacable information in there and we really didn't have time to recover if anything went wrong. If I do get her to try it, I'll report back. (I think an post about "how to recover an iPhone from an iTunes backup" would be exciting!)
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