Google Sync For iPhone

Google released an excellent new tool for automatically syncing your iPhone’s contacts and calendars and GMail and Google Calendar. Although, as is usually the case with Google, the service is marketed as being in Beta it seems to be working very well. Add or edit a contact either on in GMail or on your iPhone and within seconds it’s been synced across. Even contact photos are synchronized. The same is true of calendar entries.

Rather than implement a new syncing application for the iPhone Google have just linked your contacts and calendars to a Microsoft Exchange server. Apple implemented push services from Exchange services in the 2.2 firmware to help market the phone as business capable. Now though, anyone who uses GMail can benefit from this technology.

Push services are useful because rather than your phone checking at a predetermined interval, probably to find that there has been no change, changes are ‘pushed’ to you. This means that not only are changes that do happen reflected much more quickly on your phone, and you don’t waste battery life or network traffic checking unnecessarily. Unfortunately it doesn’t support email syncing, but surely that’s only a matter of time?

Visit http://m.google.com/sync to get your iPhone set up.