Yesterday, I achieve my clean-up goals, and so this morning I backed up my contacts onto my Mac and turned on the contact sync’ing.

Looking on the Google website, it says that to only synchronise the ‘My Contacts’ group, you should chose to delete all of the contacts on your iPhone, otherwise the ‘All Contacts’ group is sync’d. I dutifully deleted all of the contacts because I had spent time sorting out the groups.

Once I turned the sync’ing on, I went to see what Contacts I had, and to my surprise, there were none! I wasn’t worried too much as I could restore them from my Mac, but that wouldn’t be for a few days.

Half an hour later, I went back and checked again and everything had finally synchronised, so there wasn’t a problem. If you get into the same situation, I guess the advice is not to panic, and to leave your phone to do it’s thing for a while!

One thing I didn’t pay attention to was the ‘Favourites’ option – I have a handfull of people in that list and it cones in handy. Fortunately, after the sync, the favourites list is preserved and are mapped to the same named contacts from Google.

However, I have noticed that I have contacts from my ‘All Contacts’ group in the list, so it looks like the advice on Google’s website might be wrong.

Other than that, Contact sync’ing is a success!

Basically, I wanted to get my calendars on Google Calendar synchronised with my iPhone (because really, my google calendar is my main calendar) and seeing as iPhone OS 3.0 supports the CalDAV standard, it should be a piece of piss.

Anyway. Turns out, you can add the calendar quite easily by following these instructions

http://www.bagofspanners.com/2009/06/17/subscribing-to-google-calendars-via-caldav-in-iphone-os-3-0/

The problem with this approach though is that you only get one calendar. Fine if you only have one, but if you have several (like I do,) then it’s no bloody good.

So, lots of references to this page later…..

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138759&topic=14252

… and I finally twig what’s going on.

Turns out, Google have implemented an Exchange Server which lets you synchronise Calendar items and Contacts with your account.

Reading between the lines, you have to be careful regarding the contacts in your GMail account, as possibly they end up on your iPhone and any contacts on your iPhone end up on GMail. It sounds like you can turn that off, but actually it sounds quite useful too. The added plus of that is, if you change the contacts in GMail, they should synchronise back to Address Book on your Mac once you plug you iPhone back in. So, one address book to rule them all.

The added plus is, you get all of your calendars on you iPhone and you can add and remove items to your hearts content!