Syncing Calendars/Contacts w/out iCloud?

I love Snow Leopard and have never had any problems with MobileMe.

So the only reason I am forced to upgrade to Lion, is for iCloud because it is very important that my Calendars and Contacts be in sync on my Mac Pro, iPhone and iPad.

To upgrade to iCloud/Lion, I will have to spend about $1500 to $2000 on the latest: Adobe CS, Filemaker, MS Office among others. Just for to continue to be able to sync. I haven't seen anything so amazing in Lion that warrants the expense to use it with the apps I use. Sure it does nifty things, but I don't need it. I'd like it, maybe. What i NEED is sync-ability.

So... for all you wizards here... is there a way to stay on Snow Leopard and use a 3rd party Calendar and Contact manager that will sync with your computer and devices, or perhaps just a syncing app that works with Addressbook and iCal, so I don't have to update to Lion or iCloud?

At least for awhile longer when I hit the lottery and can afford the $2000

Yeah.. with the "MM ditch" as you well put it, my concerns about going to what I used to think was the lighter of the MS darkside, Google... I've warmed a great deal to all your Google suggestions.

Isn't iDisk being dropped too? Making Dropbox a must anyway. I've had it for a long time. Great app.

In my....25 yrs computing (all on Mac), I've never had the concerns, hesitations, discomfort, consternation, looming expenses as with Lion.

Sure I always waited a few weeks until I could read if there were any really nasty bugs before upgrading to the latest OS over the yrs, but I was always eager and finally did. And OS/s were costly then! Now I don't even want Lion if it were free!

But what do I know with their stock at $580+, right?