Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Since the day it came out, I’ve been an avid user of my G1 and a fellow developer of a few applications on the Android Platform. I firmly believe that G1 is one of the best gadgetie devices made. It’s pretty ugly, and outdated by now, but none of the more recent Android based phones were able to steal my heart. Being a quite heavy user of my G1, all my contacts, calendars, emails were constantly being synced up with the device. Probably for the very first time, I didn’t have to worry about moving contacts from one phone to the other. At the time I was assuming my next shiny phone would be another Android based phone. I was wrong! Recently, I started using a Nokia N97 Mini. And I got it for free (one of the perks of working at “connecting people“).
Of course, the immediate problem I faced was the contact syncing. My phonebook was nicely stored somewhere in the clouds of Google, where I must absolutely not worry about them getting lost, or being sold soliciting purposes. That data must be moved. But how?
I had a few options for moving all that data on my phone.
To begin with, the good old, “export / import” way. That was too much work! And, the calendar involvement in the mix would make things just more difficult. And there came, iSync to the rescue, which was allegedly perfectly capable of synching Google Calendar, Contacts to the many devices. And my new shiny N97 Mini was in the list. It seemed like, I had a winner method of syncing.
By the way, as the title suggests, all this is happening on a Mac, a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. *I don’t do Windows on my personal time, even though Windows 7 looks like, Microsoft got it right : )
I had to jump through a few hoops, and Bing’ed, and Google’d around. And when I think, I got it right, I decided to share a quick summary of my “Nokia N97 Mini and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iSync, Google Contacts, Google Calendar” adventure here.
The basic steps are:
- Sync your Google Contacts to the “Address Book.app”
- Sync your Google Calendar to “iCal.app”
- Download and install the N97 Mini (or your device) the compatibility driver thinger to your computer, so “iSync.app” will know about your device.
- Try to find, where the heck the “Sync Now” button in the “menu” is.
- Sync Now
Sync your Google Contacts to the “Address Book.app”
This is very straightforward. Launch the “Address Book.app”. Take a peek at the link below.
http://www.google.com/support/contactsync/
All you need to do is enable the “Synchronize with Google” checkbox, and enter your Google username/pass in the “Configure” dialog.
Sync your Google Contacts to the “iCal.app”
This is also very straightforward. Google explains it perfectly. Link below.
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical
In summary, they say;
To set up CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal, follow these steps:
- Open Apple iCal, go to Preferences and then the Accounts tab.
- Click on the + button to add an account.
- Under Account Information, enter your Google Account username and password.
- Under Server Options, add the following URL:
https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREMAIL@DOMAIN.COM/user
Replace ‘youremail@domain.com’ with the email address that you use to log in to Calendar. Make sure to include the ‘@domain.com’ portion (which is @gmail.com for Gmail users) in this section.
iSync.app
When you launch iSync, and start the “Add Device” process, iSync will scan around to see if any devices are connected (USB or Bluetooth). I believe, even though iSync was able to see my N97, it showed me an error about compatibility. Hence, you need to go to http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/isync/compatibility-and-download and download the compatibility plug-in for your phone/device.
Download and install it. The rest is really easy. Nokia already has a very good tutorial on how-to, so just follow it. http://europe.nokia.com/support/product-support/isync/how-to/using_isync
If you can see your phone/device in the iSync app, you’re pretty close.
The trick for me was, I read somewhere in the docs that, after installing the compatibility plugin, click “Sync Now”. That was a hard part. Where the heck was “Sync Now”?
It’s on your “menu”, where all the little icon thingies are.
And if you cannot see it there, in order to add the Sync menu to the menu bar, open iSync, choose iSync > Preferences, and then select “Show status in menu bar.” That’s how you start the “Address Book” and “iCal” sync as well.
That’s hopefully it. Good Sync’in!
*disclaimer: this is not intended to be a tutorial on how to do all this. simply a compilation of a few official links, and tips/tricks. if you have trouble during any of the steps, i’m certainly not the one to help you resolve them.
Posted in Hacks, Tips, Tricks, Mobile Tech, Nokia | 2 Comments »
