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A while back Google introduced Sync for iPhone and Windows Mobile.  It worked by using the MS  Exchange protocol, so you could sync your contacts and calendar without any extra software.

Recently they updated it, now to include email support.  So I decided to give it a try.  I never tried the original, so this is my first time using it.  My thoughts after the break…

I tried this on my iPhone since myFunambol sync couldn’t do scheduled syncs on the iPhone.  I figured the only thing better than scheduled was push, so I tried it.

Of course I had to set it up, which was rather easy.  All I had to do was enter my Google credentials and m.google.com as the server and viola, I was ready to go.  I chose what to sync, and initially I did all 3 services (email, contacts, and calendar).

So to start, I’ll talk about calendar support.  It worked fine, actually. All the dates in my calendar went to my iPhone in a matter of seconds, and I was able to read my events (birthdays, holidays).  Very simple indeed.  If there was one thing I would want Google (or Apple for that matter) to do it would be to add support for custom repeating events.  What I mean is you can only choose yearly, weekly, daily, etc.  By custom I mean repeating patterns like “the third Monday of every June” and stuff like that.

Next up is contacts.  Now I actually had to go and manually add contacts to my Google account.  I did and they showed up almost instantly on my iPhone.  I went in on the iPhone and added contact pictures, and they synced back to Google in a matter of seconds!  The picture below shows it: left is the iPhone and right is my Gmail.

Last was email.  This is where it started to get screwy.  Now it sees all of my folders and such, but I cannot seem to access all of my mail.  It shows the folders, but when I open it to view the messages, it will download for a moment and then say no messages.  It doesn’t even bother downloading some of the folders, even though I have them set to sync.  It was a mess.  My inbox was fine, but I like to file my mail and want to be able to pull any message up from my phone, and I simply could not do this with Exchange.  Maybe it’s the iPhone, or maybe it’s Google.  I’m not sure.  If you happened to try this in Windows Mobile, please post your experiences with it in the comments.

For email, I’ll stick to IMAP.  I like IMAP.  It’s easy, it’s fast, and it’s push.  It’s Exchange without the pain-in-the-ass.

This isn’t really a review, more of an opinion, but if I had to score it, it would be 4 out of 5 stars.  The contacts and calendar sync are very well seasoned.  The email capability, however, needs some work.  Mainly on folder/label support.