Does Google’s Mobile Sync Replace Sync in a Blink?
Monday, March 2nd, 2009I’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.
