alistairphillips.com

My fun and games started quite innocently with me wanting to sell my Nokia 6120 Classic and N80 via fonebank.com and in the N80's place I was going to use my Orange SPV C500 (Windows Mobile) phone. Of course that won't sync in OS X without third party software but then it occured to me that Google could come in useful.

I am already using SpanningSync to push/pull my Address Book contacts to Google Mail (I use Google Apps for my domain) and remembered seeing Google offering mobile sync for Windows Mobile and iPhones. And since that was using ActiveSync behind the scenes what better match could you ask for with a Windows Mobile smartphone?

Well a lot actually... Setting up the sync on the phone was easy enough (once you remember to put in google as the domain - how is one meant to know if it's required or not?) So if you ever see a ActiveSync 'DEV09' error then it's a mising domain option. First thing I tried was calendar sync and that worked flawlessly - well done guys. So switching on contact sync left me thinking it would all be done in a few seconds. Meh. Meh Meh Meh.

And that's where it turned nasty. Two contacts would copy over after which it would bomb out with a few hex error codes (nice one there Microsoft). Googling for the answer did not come up with much other than issues with duplicate contacts, one-named contacts etc. None of those helped so in the end I had to remove all contacts and push that change out. Sync worked then and I started adding one contact back at a time. Since I'm always one to try and look on the bright side it was nice to be ruthless and do a spring clean reducing my contacts by 50%.

But back to the down side, since I use gTalk for all my chatting pushing out a blank address book messed up all my chat contacts. I had to re-add each one back in for me to be re-associated with them. Thankfully only one contact required a re-authorisation request with the others going through fine.

Sitting here right now and trying a sync on the SPV C500 is resulting in the hex error codes again - but at least I've got everyone on there that I need now. So come on WWDC and release that new iPhone so I can move away from this!