Can My Mac and T-Mobile G1 (Google Android) Phone Sync?

My T-Mobile G1 phone based on Google's Android platform arrived on Monday. It was a big change for me because I've been using Windows Mobile based smartphones since 2002 when I started with the very first T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition. Since Android phones sync directly with Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts, this also meant switching away from Microsoft Outlook on my old Windows XP PC. Given this big change, I thought it might be interesting to see if I could sync Contacts and Calendar with my Mac. One of my goals was to only use tools provided by Apple or Google. I wanted to avoid trust issues involved with using third party web services that worked as an intemediatry between the Google web services and my Mac.

However, before diving into calendars and contacts, I wanted to mention a basic Android feature that works fine with the Mac: The Android phone working as an external flash drive. The G1 comes with a 1GB miniSD card pre-installed (it can work with cards up to 16GB large). I used the supplied USB to miniUSB cable to connect the G1 to my iMac. As you can see the iMac sees it as an ordinary drive formatted using FAT16 which can be read by and written to by almost any desktop/notebook platform. The Mac does not see the internal 256MB system memory used to store applications and systems data, however.

So far, the only data I've seen stored on the miniSD card are the photos taken using the 3 megapixel camera (stored in the dcim folder) and music. My miniSD came with 11 songs on it in the Music folder.

Google wants me to sync the G1 only with Gmail's Contacts and Google Calendar. Google provides a two-way sync tool for Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook 2003 or 2007 on Microsoft Windows. However, it doesn't provide any sync tool for Mac OS X's iCal (or Microsoft Entourage for that matter). Google Calendar can export individual calendars to a ZIP file containing .ics format event data files.

Starting with Mac OS X 10.5.3, however, there is a sync between OS X's Address Book and Google Contacts. The original blog item announcing this feature ont he Google Mac Blog is found here...

Mac OS X 10.5.3: sync Google Contacts

As you can see from my configuation, I originally had it configured to sync with Yahoo! Mail's contacts list. And, I added Google Contacts sync. The Address Book option box did not force me to choose just one source to sync with. So, I assume this is acceptable.

Address Book has Always Allow set as for permission to access the OS X keychain.

The problem is that this sync feature doesn't fully work. As far as I can tell, new contacts added to Google Contact syncs with Address Book. However, changes to existing contacts do not flow from Google Contacts to Address Book. I had hoped to use Address Book to clean up the mess Google created in my Google Contacts list. Google finally changed their behavior of auto-updating the list within asking me yesterday. But, the damage of the years prior to this change remains. You can read about the changes Google made on Oct. 21 here...

More changes to Gmail contact manager

The upshot is that I was not able to sync anything using my original criteria of using only Apple or Google provided tools. So, my next set of projects involves taking a look at these third party tools as a possible solution to partnering my G1 phone with my Mac.

BusySync ($25)
GCALDaemon (Open Source)
Spanning Sync (Subscription or one time $65 purchase)
syncje for Mac ($39.95)

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ADDENDUM: A reader emailed me pointing to this item on Mac OS X Hints...

10.5: Sync Gmail Calendars with iCal

This links to this new Google Calendar Help page with instructions on syncing Google Calendar with Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird...

Google Calendar CalDAV support

I followed the directions for iCal and now have it synced with Google Calendar and, indirectly, the G1.