DISQUS

Michael's Thoughts: iPhone 3G Sync with Google Contacts

  • Craig Sanders · 1 year ago
    This explains what was happening for me, thank you. I'm going to fill in the email field with a bogus and obvious placeholder address just so that Google Contacts functions right with the iPhone. This will also let me assign photos to those contacts in Google, which can't be done when they don't have an email address. Now if we could only get those pix to transfer to iPhone.
  • Roland · 1 year ago
    Very nice find. Thank you very much. I was wondering what was going on as some of my contacts seemed to update FROM my iPhone, while others did not.
  • johan spriet · 1 year ago
    Many thanks for this information, it works perfectly
  • Sonia · 1 year ago
    Strong work! Thanks so much....it worked great. I just created dummy addresses and it synced perfectly with Google contacts. Now if I could only find something that would let me choose the groups to sync with instead of all of them!
  • Michael Ridley · 1 year ago
    Yeah, that would be nice! I looked into that, but there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to do it. It could be possible to access the groups using the Google Contacts API, however there's no way to sync that into the iPhone contact list.

    It would be nice if the iPhone SDK would allow access to the phone contacts, as then you could create a web service that would sync Google Contact Groups and even do it over the air. But, with the current iPhone SDK/API that's not possible.

    -m
  • Owen Cooper · 1 year ago
    Check out the app Sync in a Blink on the AppStore. It's a lot better than the iTunes sync. It handles two way sync properly (without the email problem) and lets you sync over the air.
  • Michael Ridley · 1 year ago
    Owen-

    Thanks for the comment. I installed the application and it rocks. I've written up my thoughts here.

    -m
  • Graham · 1 year ago
    Perhaps a good idea to put a fake (unique) email address for each contact without an email adress. For example, my grandmother (let's say her name is Jane Doe) is never going to get an email address and I'm never actually going to want to send her an email but I might want to update her details on my iphone and have them sync back.
    Based on this it would be a good idea to create a fake email address for her to allow the syncing to work. Maybe something like jane.doe@fake.email.com.

    I haven't tried this as yet although I was wondering why some syncs weren't happening in both directions so I'm now going to work through my contacts and do this to see what happens.
  • Michael Ridley · 1 year ago
    You can definitely do it that way. But I would suggest using Sync in a Blink instead. It rocks! And then you don't have to bother with that at all. For more information see here.

    -m