How do you keep 2 Macs and an iPhone in sync?

[Phil Lee]

Apologies if this has been asked befroe but I can't find an exact solution to my question in the search.

I am getting a 3GS on Friday, it will be my first iPhone having been a user of Windows Mobile phones since they were first available. I currently use a hosted Exchange account for my email on my phone, iMac and MacBook. I use Push email on the phone and access email via IMAP on the Macs. I sync contacts with my phone using Exchange but have no contact synching on either of my computers. I sync multiple calendars between the computers using BusySync and Google Calendar. My phone syncs with Google Calendar using GooSync and thse changes then get pushed to Exchange keeping everything in sync.

I am not sure whether to continue with my Exchange account, which costs ~$10 per month, or switch to Google Apps for email, contacts and calendars.

What is the preferred method of keeping 2 Macs and an iPhone in sync?

 

[AiralynRose]

MobileMe - $99/year or you can buy on amazon for $69ish
Push Email
Push Calendar sync
Push Contact sync
Bookmark sync
Dashboard Widget Sync
Dock Items Sync
Keychain sync
Mail Accounts sync as well as mail rules/sigs/smart boxes
Notes sync
Preferences sync
(all of which can be turned on/off as you choose)

20GB iDisk
Access to everything online via me.com
Find My iPhone service
Back to my Mac service

 

[Phil Lee]

MobileMe - $99/year or you can buy on amazon for $69ish
Push Email
Push Calendar sync
Push Contact sync
20GB iDisk
Access to everything online via me.com
Find My iPhone service

But I want to use my own domain for emails, not Mobile Me.

 

[Phil A.]

With google you can sync contacts and calendars to the phone using exchange active sync (yeah, it's a bit confusing!)


Things are complicated a bit by the way you have calendars on google, but mail and contacts on Exchange: you can only add a single Exchange Active Sync account and as both google and exchange use exchange activesync you can only push one of them.


Your options if you want to keep your domain name are:

1) Keep hosted exchange - iPhone supports it in exactly the same way as Windows Mobile does (except for task syncing which isn't supported) so you wouldn't have to change anything. To view your calendar on your macs, use CalDAV which would sync to your google calendar. You can also add Caldav accounts in OS 3.0 on the phone so you could add Google Calendars directly that way.


2) Move everything to google and use IMAP for e-mail and push sync for the calendars and contacts to the phone. To sync to your macs you'd need something like spanning sync


The only thing you would lose going the google route is push e-mail and I guess you have to decide if thats worth the money each month...

 

[Phil Lee]

The only thing you would lose going the google route is push e-mail and I guess you have to decide if thats worth the money each month...

Thanks for the reply. I already have a family license for BusySync so can sync Google calendars. If push email is the only thing I lose then I think I'll probably switch to Google.

 

[entatlrg]

Any new software idea's?

SugarSync, works for iphone too.