How To Google Sync Your WinMo Device

Google Sync has been out for a little while now, and we have already done a few things on that you can find in our forums (click here) or on our website (click here). But I got an email from our good friend at Blownfuze.org Doug Simmons who has put together his own “How To Google Sync Your WinMo Device”. If any of you have tried, it’s not as easy as you might think: 

Pretty funny, sort of, how it takes a three paragraphed article with nine links including one to another guide with other links just to get push email working with our phone… but it’s been a long journey just to get to this point for those of us without an accommodating IT department.

Doug

Read Doug Simmons How To Google Sync Your WinMo Device after the break. Be sure to check out Doug’s website Blownfuze.org and leave a comment here for Doug on How To Google Sync Your WinMo Device.

Google Sync (push) now open to all WinMo Gmail users. Here’s how:

So Google finally let all us ActiveSyncers into the push club, extending their welcome from Google Apps Premiere users to free Gmail account holders. They call it Google Sync. It’s a little tricky to get working, not nearly as simple as their online guide suggests which left me frustrated with headaches; but Laos101 of XDA cranked out some instructions which worked for me and now I can get emails in under ten seconds. You want to follow that guide verbatim and it entails messing both with your phone and with your Google account so set aside a good half hour to dive into this. Google’s online calendar is definitely worth setting up for this along with Google Contacts. You can export your Outlook contacts and calendar as CSV files and beam them to Google and you can also sync your PC’s Outlook’s calendar with Google’s using Google Calender Sync if you prefer Outlook over their web interface (but nothing for contacts or tasks syncing with Outlook, at least not with free Gmail accounts).

All data flies in and out fully encrypted over an SSL connection. If you run into problems with ActiveSync pushing failing on you, try danielherrero’s Connection State Checker which pings Google periodically and if your data connection drops it will initiate a new one. Note that push email requires a data connection being kept alive which drains the battery more than interval syncing does. However, as you’ll see in the guide, you can tell ActiveSync to chill out and check on intervals after defined business hours. Also note that this is still very beta so don’t expect perfection (EG no attachments yet on email from non-gmail users) — but they’re working on it.

Lastly if you like the sound of text message-speed email but have a non-Gmail address that you don’t want to give up, provided it’s not hosted on a lame provider that won’t let you forward incoming email somewhere else, you could create a Gmail account and then you might be able to get your existing email account to forward to that Gmail account and then set Gmail to let you send email using your old email account in the From address, including from your phone, PC Outlook or Thunderbird or any other IMAP-idle client. That will overlay Exchange behavior onto your own address to take advantage of ActiveSync pushing.

Doug Simmons

The links:
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup — Gmail signup
http://m.google.com/sync — Google Sync home intro
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=564992 — Laos101’s push Gmail guide
http://google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138636&topic=14299 — Google Sync ActiveSync config guide
http://google.com/calendar — Google Calendar
http://google.com/contacts — Google Contacts
http://google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=89955 — Google Calendar Sync for Outlook
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=567450 — Connection state checker, data keep-alive tool
http://google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139655 — Google Sync limitations, not necessarily complete

Pretty funny, sort of, how it takes a three paragraphed article with nine links including one to another guide with other links just to get push email working with our phone… but it’s been a long journey just to get to this point for those of us without an accommodating IT department.

Doug