So in the past, I used to sync my contacts via bluetooth to my phone. Well because Android is half-baked, it has no such ability on the T-Mobile G1. But, as an alternative they have a periodic OTA sync feature with your google/Gmail contacts. This, it turns out, really hurts your battery life. It's not a push from Google. Your phone wakes up every 5 minutes (from what I gather from forum postings) and pulls contacts, calendar and gmail changes from google. If your away from WiFi it's done over G3/Edge. So I turned that off and force a manual sync on demand, just like I used to do with my Nokia phone over bluetooth.
First order of business, get the google calendar into iCal easily. You could already subscribe (read only) to your google calendar, but you had to go into your google calendar to add events. Well they added calDAV ability to google calendars which overcomes this. This gets me where I wanted to be a long time ago. I wanted the google calendar to be my primary calendar but didn't want to have to depend on web access to update.
So to get my Macbook Pro contacts to google I had to first enable google syncing. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, this feature is available to you. If you do not have one of those, no worries, there's a hack to enable it, which I did. I even had a old ipod entry to hack to make it work (my 30Gb 5th gen ipod was stolen).
It works great, but the merge of the google (and yahoo in my case) contacts with your address book is terrible. Basically you end up with a ton of duplicates and contact entries for every 'suggested contact' email address you email too. Bleh! Because I have both Yahoo and Google sync enabled those email address-only and duplicate addresses went to yahoo too (why yahoo? because I can...). YIKES! To make matters worse, a lot of contacts were missing critical information, like phone numbers, address or email addresses. It seems the 'merge' didn't work at all. The fix was to delete all the yahoo and gmail contact entries, and then within iSync (which doesn't really make sense because iSync is only used to sync to phones) reset all sync history.
Then I manually cleaned up my Macbook Pro contacts (painful, but not the end of the world). Then I ran sync from the menu bar again.
Presto! Data in three places. Then I manually sync the G1 (settings -> Data Syncronization, press the menu button, 'Sync Now') and the same data is now on the phone. Data now flows in all directions effortlessly. Eventually I'll figure out how to put a 'sync now' shortcut on the phone so I don't have to drill into the menu.
But there's always a catch. In this case, the catch is Instant Messenger. Well, it turns out (and I think it warns you) that if you delete a contact who is also an IM contact in either service, it deletes them from your IM. DOH! So now I don't have any of my gtalk or Yahoo IM contacts. Fortunately most of my IM is MSN or AIM. But still, not fun. Now I have to go back through my address book and look for yahoo and gtalk people, like Siva, Tariq or Dayton and re-add them to the corresponding client. If I had it all to do over, I would log into the native clients and try to export my IM contact list. Then again, maybe it's a good thing. I had a contact who I can't for the life of me remember why it's there. Well it's not there anymore...
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