Cell Phones, Calendars And Contacts: Encouraging (Albeit Imperfect) Progress

In recognition of the in-progress GSMA Mobile World Congress hosted by one of my favorite cities in the world, Barcelona (no, I’m not there..sniff…), I thought I’d give you an update on last week’s three-part post based on some snowy-weekend additional work.

First a few words on the BlackBerry Bold (9000). Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten very far with my hands-on review. Those applications capable of leveraging the phone’s built-in Wi-Fi transceiver are testing-applicable, and I’m generally impressed with them. The web browser, for example, seems to be rendering-accurate (albeit not particularly rendering-speedy). But, even though I worked with Horizon Wireless to get the phone service-unlocked and therefore to a point where it’d accept my T-Mobile SIM and its unlimited data plan, the Bold still refused to go online with EDGE due to a lack of BlackBerry Internet Service on my T-Mobile account.

I also wasn’t very impressed with the phone’s cellular reception capabilities, versus those of my existing T-Mobile Dash. Therefore, at least for now the two very nice OtterBox cases I was sent for review will go unused, as I plan to stick with phones that don’t require special, costly services beyond my existing unlimited data plan. I still have a Prying Eyes teardown of the BlackBerry Bold scheduled; stay tuned for more on that, both online and in print.

As of last Wednesday night, I’d given up on OS 10.5’s Address Book’s built-in Google Contacts sync capabilities, due to Google’s propensity to add any email address to which a user sends messages (or replies) to the contacts database. However, on Thursday night I happily received confirmation from Spanning Sync’s Charlie Wood that the company’s product focuses its sync attention on Google’s ‘My Contacts’ subdivision of the ‘All Contacts’ list.

On Friday night, after severing both Address Book and iCal’s links to their Google equivalents (since Spanning Sync handles calendar sync, too), and after wiping both Google Contacts and Google Calendar clean in preparation, I initiated my first Spanning Sync session. After several hours, the initial sync of my ~2,200 contacts still hadn’t yet completed, so I left the program churning away and went to bed. The next morning, I found the sync complete and my Google Calendar cache fully loaded. The contacts sync unfortunately was a bit less impressive; the Google Contacts list ended up being seven entries short of its Address Book counterpart.

After perusing the logs, Charlie Wood and I figured out what was going on. I’d previously pointed out that Google Contacts refuses to differentiate between two different contacts with the same email address, even if other contact details differ. As it turns out, Google Contacts also refuses to accept multiple contacts with the same first-plus-last name combo or even close variants; it sees Michael and Mike as the same, for example, but not James and Jim. To wit, since Address Book contained Michael Wong from Sandisk and Mike Wong from OnOne Software, Google Contacts would only accept one of them. And if the one it accepted was the lesser important of the two, deleting it wouldn’t automatically cause the other to appear; I had to export the remaining contact from Address Book as a vCard file, delete it and re-import it in order to force the re-sync.

Once I got the initial calendar and contact tethers between OS X and Google matched up, my next step was to determine if updates correctly trickled through the chain. I’m happy to report that they do. Edits, additions and deletions to both sets of data on both ends of the sync link were replicated on the other end within a matter of minutes, including making it up to the MobileMe online repository and from there to the iPod touch. Flush with success, I decided to push my luck and take sync to the next level, using Google Mobile Sync to get the data to my spare T-Mobile Dash, at the time running Windows Mobile 5. After entering the parameters for Google’s Microsoft-licensed Exchange server into the phone, an ActiveSync session automatically kicked off and populated the Mobile Calendar and Contacts databases. And as before, any time I alter data anywhere in the chain, other links are similarly updated within a few minutes (assuming, of course, that they’re online at the time). I have ActiveSync set to update ‘as items arrive’ both peak and off-peak hours, by the way, to preserve battery life considering my infrequent updates.

One minor glitch bears mentioning, however. In its default Address Book-compliant mode, Spanning Sync inserts supposedly invisible Unicode characters in-between various name and address fields in order to differentiate them. Those characters aren’t normally visible in Google Contacts (except, strangely, via the Safari browser built into my iPod Touch), but they are visible in Windows Mobile’s Contacts applet. Granted, I could switch Spanning Sync into its Gmail-compliant mode, thereby eliminating the spurious Unicode characters, but then Spanning Sync might get confused and populate name and address fields with the wrong data. Or I could dispense with Google Mobile Sync and instead try an alternative Google-to-phone sync program such as NuevaSync, OggSync or Soocial…but then I might cause more new problems than I solved. For now, at least, I’m going to leave things as-is and try to ignore the visible Unicode characters, since contacts search from the phone still works fine.

Continue reading with Part Two of this post, ‘Cell Phones, Calendars And Contacts: O/S Upgrades Bring Mixed Results‘…