Google Syncing ... with better Contacts

Just noticed this recently.  Well, noticed it before I knew about it.

Last week, Google opened up synchronization of calendar and contacts with a bunch of devices, including the iPhone.  Pretty damned sweet.  

I had been using Nuevasync to do just about the same thing (basically set up your Google account through an Exchange server so your iPhone could sync with it).  It worked pretty well, but I did have some qualms with giving these guys access to my Google account, but, you know ... gift horse.  This just did the calendar synchronization, and it worked pretty well.  I was overjoyed at a clean way to get my calendar entries from GCal onto the iPhone, and even elevated the native iPhone Calendar app to my front page. 

I had also purchased Sync in a Blink to synchronize my contacts between GMail and the iPhone.  Sorta worked.  It was a bit of a laborious process to get things to match, and I ended up with a ton of duplicates that I was trying to slog through.  And the merging function was pretty laborious.  But it worked - got my GMail contacts and iPhone contacts all living in one, happy, dysfunctional family.  

And then they went and made a French version of it and fried the English version, so I was waiting.

But then Google came along and solved both problems in one great leap.  I made the changes right away, and then repeated it for my wife's iPhone.  Huzzah!

The process is pretty simple.  You basically:

1. Set up an Exchange account on the iPhone in the Mail, Contacts, Calendar, area of Settings
2. for the server use m.google.com

And basically you're set.

The step I initially missed and created some frustration was this:

Access m.google.com/sync from your mobile device.  This will allow you to choose up to five calendars to sync between your device and GCal.

The one bummer is that you can't seem to control the colors your calendar appears in on the iPhone.  The first calendar - your personal calendar - appears to always be red.  A bit of a bummer when my personal GCal calendar color is blue, and my wife's calendar is a hot pink; those colors sorta get transposed.  Spent about 15 minutes playing around with ordering things a bit, and at best it seemed like a slippery eel trying to get the calendars ordered.

So, I started mucking around with my contacts.  Now, GMail's contacts have been much maligned.  They were originally designed as sort of an afterthought, and sucked in every contact you had any email contact with.  After awhile, they added a couple of standard contact fields, and allowed you to add custom fields. 

But it appears that along with sync, they've updated their Contacts functionality.  Now, some of this might be because - with the Contacts functionality so poor at the outset - I largely stopped paying attention to what they were doing.  Some of this might have been in place for awhile.  (Though I must say, I checked in only a few months ago when I was looking at how to get friends' Shared feeds into Google Reader - which included some reference to a Preferred Group or something which I never figured out; at the time, Contacts did not look this different.)

The long and the short, from what I can tell is:

1. They've allowed for better grouping of Contacts. Much easier.  I was dragging and dropping people around, assigning them to multiple Groups.  Though they really should stick with one metaphor and keep it as labeling your contacts.  They now have essentially the same functionality in GMail, Contacts, and GDocs - and arguably in GCal - and they call it something different in each one.  Labeling, Groups, Folders, and Calendars.  But along with this better Groupness, they now have a Group called My Contacts.  You can move contacts in and out of My Contacts.  It's this group that gets synced with your devices.  All the other flotsam is still there, under All Contacts, but nicely separated out. 
2. Merge.  Merge is very nice - much nicer than Sync in a Blink - though that's largely because you have the whole screen to look at and it's mostly a manual process.  You click the checkboxes on multiple Contacts, click Merge these x contacts...  and it does a pretty good job of merging all the details together, you just have to click OK.  

As some people have pointed out, this increased functionality now means that Google has pretty much the same functionality as MobileMe.  I don't know; I don't have MobileMe, but this is a pretty big step in terms of Google functionality through the Cloud.  Now, if only they'd allow me to edit my docs on the iPhone....