heidi go seek

Everybody manages their personal information differently, and if you read through some blog posts here you can see that I usually struggle with managing mine.  The iPhone has definitely made it easier, but it's taking some work to get everything organized to a point to where I'm happy.

The push/sync stuff is pretty cool, but the price tag of MobileMe is not.  I am on the trial of it right now, but I'm not getting much use out of it.  First off, I'm not a Mac user, and I'm quite happy not being one.  It does work with Windows and Outlook, but I'm also not an Outlook user.  My calendar doesn't change very much in one day either.  Maybe it would be useful if I had a lot to manage, or if I was already accustomed to using .Mac or something, but I don't.

I live online with everything, including my email and calendar.  I realize Google pretty much owns me, but it works for me, and even the iPhone makes it work easier. 

Email

Setting up Gmail to sync and even push to the iPhone is not a problem, there is an option for this in iTunes already.  I don't have my email app on the first page though.  While I do use the iPhone app for email, I still prefer to check my email in the Gmail page (which is nicely optimized for the phone).  The app is good for checking how many new messages I have, or quickly browsing new email, but I cannot star or archive mail there so I still prefer visiting Gmail online.

Contacts

Managing contacts on the iPhone is awesome.  You can call, email, map addresses, even visit hyperlinks straight from the contact page.  It is so useful... assuming you have updated information stored in there.

There is an option to import contacts from Gmail, but my contact list there scared me.  Gmail likes to automatically add frequently emailed contacts in your list of regular contacts, and I accumulated a scary list of people I didn't know over the years.  It took me about a day and a half, but I got this list down to about 100 real contacts that I could be happy with keeping in my phone.  I went the extra step of looking up friends on other social networks (Facebook mostly) to make sure I had updated contact information for them.  I can also import vcards from LinkedIn and other networks that will merge with existing contacts in Google.

Once this is done the contacts can automatically sync to my iPhone when I plug in to iTunes.  Now I can update contacts on my iPhone or in Gmail and they will be the same in both places.

I can push contacts to the phone too, but I haven't set that up yet.  The process will be the same as the calendar push I talk about next.  I just wanted to try the push out with the calendar first so I didn't accidentally delete a bunch of contacts while playing around with it.

Calendar

The only thing that the iPhone didn't support was syncing the calendar with Google Calendar.  There is an optimized page for Google Calendar, but the app version of the calendar is actually quite a bit nicer.  I can change the views and get reminders, and it's accessible even when the internet is slow or off.

Having your Google calendar sync to your iPhone without using MobileMe is actually possible.  I originally found the solution on Lifehacker, but the blog post that explains it is here:

Using Google as a *free* MobileMe alternative (with push contacts & calendar)

It's a multi step process, and everything seemed to work fairly well for me.

There was a problem with the captcha unlock not going through right away, but NuevaSync emailed me to fix that.  Once I did the calendar syncing happened with no other problems.

This only syncs your main calendar to the phone.  I have many many many different calendars in my Google Calendar, which will not appear on the calendar app, but that's fine with me.  The main calendar is where all the important stuff is anyway.  To view the other calendars the Google Calendar page is still a good place to go on the iPhone.

If you do a contact sync through NuevaSync you can also use Google, the difference between this and what is already native to iTunes is that the contacts will be pushed to your phone without the sync from iTunes, which is a pretty good deal.

If you're a Plaxo user you can also set up Plaxo to sync with your contacts on your phone with this service.  I've only been playing around a little bit with Plaxo, but so far I'm pretty happy with what I can do with my Google contacts so I probably won't be switching things around.

I have no compelling reason to keep my MobileMe after the trial now.  I did mess around some with the photo gallery, and there seems to be other cool features, but nothing I can't get elsewhere for free (as opposed to $99/year).  The photo gallery seems really nice by the way, but I had some frustration using it because it seemed to integrate more with iPhoto, which I obviously don't have being a Windows person.

Now that some of my personal information is cleaned up, especially the contacts, I think I will be more diligent about keeping it that way. 

** Update **

I just turned on the NuevaSync option for contacts on my phone and one really really awesome feature is that it also connects the profile pics that the person sets in Gmail as their contact image on my phone!