Syncing Google Calendar with iPhone

When it comes to the Apple iPhone and Windows iTunes, you can synchronize your bookmarks with Internet Explorer or Windows Safari, and contacts from Outlook or Yahoo! but when it comes to synchronizing your calendar you are severely limited, unless all you use is Outlook, because that’s all you can directly sync with at the moment.

I was an Outlook user for years until I gave Microsoft the (thunder) Bird. The biggest problem with making the change from Outlook to Thunderbird was the loss of my synchronization between my iPhone and my calendar, because I don’t use Outlook anymore. I do use Google Calendar (GCal) because it allows me to access my calendar from anywhere (like Gmail) and share calendars between my family.

So how do you sync the iPhone with Google Calendar?

Well, you can’t. But through some sneaky workarounds, it is possible. Since the iPhone only knows how to sync with Outlook, the trick is to get your GCal appointments synced with Outlook.

This is possible with some commercial (pay) services such as ScheduleWorld and SyncMyCal, however the route I went after trying his free trial was David Levinson’s gSyncit. It’s a whole 10 bucks and it works great. After throwin’ down $10 via PayPal and instantly getting the registration code by email, it got rid of the nags, enabled automatic synchronization, and allowed me to add the other 3 GCal calendars that I needed to sync with Outlook. Plus, you don’t need to touch GCal and copy ICAL URLs. Just supply gSyncit with your GCal username and password, then it gives you a list of Google Calendars to sync with.

You can sync both ways, too… from GCal to Outlook, and vice-versa. I am currently only syncing one-way (from GCal to Outlook) so I can’t comment on how well it works the other way.

After configuring gSyncit and clicking the Sync button on my Outlook toolbar, I was able to sync my iPhone through iTunes with ease. Now all my Google appointments are on my iPhone!

…now if I could just figure out a way to get the Chargers to beat the Patriots…

2 Replies to "Syncing Google Calendar with iPhone"

  • Chris Harrison
    Sep 18, 2007 (7:00 am)
    Reply

    SyncMyCal is the solution I decided on, but I use it so that I can sync stuff to my iPod and cellphone. They do have a free version available, but synchronization is a manual process.

  • Junni
    Feb 28, 2008 (1:25 am)
    Reply

    So you still have to you Outlook to sync Gcal…that’s a problem when you use Ubuntu as operating system.


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