Despite Joe Huffman proclaiming, “I hate Windows Mobile,” at the most recent Gun Blogger Rendezvous, the phone that replaced my now-very-clean KRZR turns out to be an Audiovox XV-6700 smartphone… with Windows Mobile 5 as its operating system. The phone is a little chunky (which is to be expected), and occasionally awkward to use, but I have to admit – I really love being able to pop it open and hop on any unsecured wifi networks that happen to be broadcasting in the area. While I am too cheap for a “real” data plan, that ability more than offsets the slight inconvenience of having a chubby phone.
However, one of the things I have been trying to do, first four years ago with a Palm Tungsten, and now with my new smartphone, is convince mobile calendar software to play well with Google Calendar. For some reason, the two never really played well with each other for me, especially since I have always been a cheap bastard, and always looked for the freeware/open-source solution. Invariably, I got duplicated entries, “all day events” actually being scheduled from midnight to midnight, instead of retaining their “all day” classification, and other such fun errors.
Unfortunately, this time was no different. While there seem to be a number of pay-to-play (and, even worse, subscribe-to-play) options out there for people interested in synchronizing their mobile calendar with their Google Calendar, free software that works well is hard to find, harder to get working anwyhere near right, and never quite does everything one would expect it to do. For the past week, I kept bouncing around to different pieces of software, clearing my calendar, starting over again, installing, uninstalling, deleting duplicates, and all manner of other unpleasantness.
Until yesterday, when I happened to notice a little “Sync” link in the upper-right corner of my Google Calendar window. Oh really? Clicking on the link, I come to find out that Google finally released software to synch Google Calendar with Outlook, and the step from Outlook to Windows Mobile is more of a sideways inch than an honest step.
*headdesk* Well, that would have been easier.
However, this solution is not perfect either – my Google Calendar is an amalgamation of my calendar, my wife’s calendar, a calendar that tracks US holidays, another that puts up weather forecasts for the next three days, and a final, fifth one that lets me know about BSG episodes. Unfortunately, the Google Calendar Sync software only synchronizes my primary calendar, and leaves the other four out of the equation. Google recognizes this, and suggests compressing the calendars by importing the other calendars into mine, but that would only result in duplicate events… again.
Oh well. While not perfect, this software resides on my home computer, rather than the limited space of my smartphone, and is a little more trustworthy and reliable than some of the options out there. Of course, now I have no excuse for missing an appointment…
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