michael’s thoughts

I’ve written a lot here about the iPhone Sync in a Blink application.  Recently Google has released their own mobile sync solution.  It masquerades as an Exchange server from the iPhone’s perspective and offers automatic wireless over the air syncing.  While running Sync in a Blink to manually sync contacts is not a huge burden for me, I’m always up for services that make my life easier.  So I’ve set up Google mobile sync for the iPhone to compare it to Sync in a Blink.

While Google mobile sync does indeed sync my contacts automatically, it does not provide the same sync quality as Sync in a Blink.  I had forgotten that one of the things that drove me to Sync in a Blink originally was that many of my contacts do not have email addresses.  Unfortunately, Google’s sync algorithm still seems to key everything off of the email address.  Which means that notes or updates that I add on the iPhone do not propagate to my Google contacts database when those contacts do not have email addresses.

I suspect I’ll turn off mobile sync and go back to using Sync in a Blink.  I may try to get them working together, although my initial attempt at doing that clobbered my contact list and I ended up having to restore my iPhone from a backup.  So I’ll be more careful if I decide to go down that road again.

I figured out my problem with Sync in a Blink. It turns out that my five mystery different contacts had no name or company name – only email addresses. I never could find them in the Contacts app but I happened to install the iPhone Peeps app (sort of a Coverflow for contacts thing – not as great as it could be, but that’s another story). Anyway, one good thing about Peeps is that it showed these five mystery contacts and I was able to edit them and add names.

Once I did that, Sync in a Blink’s show ungrouped contacts option stopped crashing the app and instead correctly displayed these five rogue contacts.

I downloaded version 2.1 of Sync in a Blink last night and to my delight, the app now supports editing contact groups.  I had written about my somewhat complicated procedure for putting contacts into a specific contact group and then sycning with Google contacts.  Having this capability integrated into the app is definitely better.

Unfortunately the ability to see contacts not already in a group is not working for me.  It crashes every time I attempt to refresh the contact list.

I’m not sure if this is due to my having a large number of contacts or for some other reason.  I’ve posted on the Sync in a Blink support forum, so hopefully someone from the company will reply soon.  I will be very glad to be able to automatically filter and determine which contacts are not in contact groups.  With over 320 contacts, it’s a huge pain to keep track of that manually.

I wrote the last entry on my iPhone using the WordPress app.  Everything went fine until I inserted the WordPress post break to cause only the introduction to appear on the site index.  After I saved that change, it looked on the iPhone app as though the post were truncated to that point and the rest of my edits were lost.

I had saved it as a draft on the server, so I logged into the panel and checked and in fact everything was there, including the post break code.  I’m glad I didn’t lose any data, but it’s frustrating that the iPhone WordPress app doesn’t support breaking the page that way.  And it’s not a very reassuring way for it to fail when it shows the post as truncated.

I wasn’t too worried as I had saved it to the server and presumably could restore from a revision, but I don’t know what would have happened if it had been only a Local Draft.  Hopefully this will be addressed in the upcoming new release of the app.

With several Twitter apps on my iPhone I’ve found that lately I’m on top of tweets but not reading blogs any more. I find that I have down time in my day to catch up on reading but not necessarily when I’m in front of a computer. So I thought I’d check out the RSS reader options for the iPhone.

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The latest version of the Sync in a Blink iPhone app supports Google Contact Groups.  This is a wonderful feature addition, as Google adds all correspondents to its “Suggested Contacts” group which then sync down to the iPhone which probably isn’t desirable.  I don’t really want all the mailing lists and support email addresses I correspond with to show up as contacts on my iPhone.  By creating an “iPhone Contacts” group, I can avoid that problem.

Unfortunately, the way contact groups are supported on the iPhone and their interaction with Sync in a Blink is not entirely intuitive.  After configuring Sync in a Blink to only sync the “iPhone Contacts” group, I found that newly created contacts on the iPhone were not syncing back to Google.  I initially thought this may be a limitation of the iPhone, but it’s not.  There is a way to make this work.

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As I’ve written before, I am a big user of Google Apps for Domains services.  This includes e-mail and contacts, but also calendar services.  I have tried a lot of online calendar services, but Google’s calendar meets my needs the best.  The big down side has always been the lack of proper mobile support.  Google does have an iPhone interface to the Google calendar system, but it’s very limited in functionality.

When I got the iPhone I was hoping to be able to sync it with my Google calendar via iTunes, but no such luck.  That may work on the Mac version of iTunes, but it does not on iTunes under Windows.  So I haven’t had good access to my calendars on my iPhone.  Until about a week ago.

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Google Earth is now available on the iPhone, which is awesome.  Something about sitting in a coffee shop in the Washington, DC area and flying around Sydney, Australia on my phone is just very cool.  One frustration though.  No street names overlays.

I can understand that the iPhone version of Google Earth is necessarily more limited than the desktop version.  They provide the Wikipedia and Panoramio overlay layers.  Why not street names?  Google Maps for the iPhone certainly includes streets.  Hopefully this will come to Google Earth shortly.

Other than that, cool application.

After several months with my iPhone 3G, it’s still my favorite phone that I’ve ever owned.  There are really only two or three things that I find ridiculous and frustrating.

The first is the lack of MMS.  From what I’ve read, the Apple opinion is that since you can email pictures on the iPhone you don’t need MMS.  Unfortunately real life doesn’t work that way.  If everyone had an iPhone then emailing pictures around would be fine.  But they don’t.  And sometimes I want to send or receive pictures from other mobile phone users.  It cannot be all that complicated to implement MMS.  Please do so, Apple!

The other feature that’s missing is video recording.  This is a lifestyle/entertainment phone.  Why can it not record video?  It has plenty of internal storage.  And the processor can clearly handle it, since there are video recorder applications for Jailbroken iPhones.  Why can’t we have a legitimate video recording application?!

The other feature I’d like to see is the ability to use the 3G networking via Bluetooth networking on my laptop.  It would be great if I could use the iPhone as a cellular modem.  I would not pay any more than I’m paying now for an additional data plan, though.  Perhaps that’s why AT&T doesn’t offer it the option.

Despite these relatively minor annoyances, the iPhone is still the best phone on the market for me.  I’m happy with my purchase, although I do need to decrease my voice plan as I’m sick of paying $170/month for phone service.

I’m still really enjoying my iPhone after having had it for a week.  I upgraded the software to 2.0.2 and despite the mixed reviews I’ve seen on the Internet, I haven’t had any problems with it.

There is a feature I’d like to see in the iPhone software.  I’ve been running around taking pictures of my contacts so that I can have a pretty image pop up when they call.  But what I’d really like to be able to do is turn the phone sideways and get a “coverflow” view of my contacts with images, as I can do with albums in the iPod interface.

While I doubt Apple reads this site, I figured I’d put it out there.