LRHB Industries Dept. of Public Records

I’m working on migrating away from MobileMe, which I used for it’s big feature, keeping everything in sync wirelessly. My web host allows me to set up my own WebDAV, which replaces iDisk nicely, but synching contacts and calendar was still an issue.

Thanks to changes in Leopard’s Address Book app, you can now choose to sync up Gmail and Yahoo! contacts, which then makes it very simple to sync up your iPhone through iTunes. That works great for synching via the USB cable, but what about wirelessly?

Enter Google Sync! Google allows you many ways to sync up your BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device, and of course, your iPhone. Instructions on setup are here, but the jist of it is that you’ll set up a Microsoft Exchange account on the phone using Google server info. It’s that easy, and it works great.

Well, almost great… one issue I ran into was that the way my phone was set up, I ended up with duplicates of all my contacts, which I’d seen a million times before in other people’s synching issues. I worked with the settings for a bit and found a quick fix.

In Address Book, set up a new Group titled Blank, and leave it empty. Then in iTunes, with your iPhone connected, under the Info tab you can choose to sync only the Blank group, and still choose to sync your Google contacts. This way your iPhone syncs wirelessly with Gmail, and your Address Book syncs with Gmail, and then the two synch with one another! Not too shabby…

Hope this helps someone out there, because I know how frustrating some of these issues can be. Good luck!