Google Sync for your mobile phones

Do you have lots of phones and your do phones have different sets of contacts each? Or maybe you want your email contacts synced with your phone contacts (no matter how many)? Or do you just not trust putting all your contacts in one place and you want to have internet-based backups that you can easily access anywhere?

Google Mobile Sync lets you do all that and more. Google Mobile Sync not only lets you synchronize our contacts between phones and your Gmail account, it also lets you synchronize the calendar on your phone with your Google account.

In a nutshell, Google Mobile Sync lets you do all these:

• Synchronize your Contacts with Google
• Depending on your phone, get Google Calendar events to your phone
• View multiple Calendars in different colors
• Make changes either on your phone or on the Web
• Have changes pushed directly to your phone

It’s available for these phone models:

• iPhone
• BlackBerry
• Nokia S60
• Nokia standard
• Sony Ericsson
• Windows Mobile

Sync uses push technology (Microsoft ActiveSync©) to automatically synchronize your Gmail contacts (using the ‘My Contacts’ group within Gmail) and/or your Google Calendar events in the background. Your phone will sync using the your “My Contacts” group within Gmail.

Apparently, if you’re using an iPhone, Google Mobile Sync will remove all existing contacts and calendar events from your phone, so make sure to back up your data before you set it up.

You have to manually remove contacts that you don’t want to be synced to your phone, by the way: from the “My Contacts” section of the contact manager, select the contact you want to remove, click “Groups” and then “Remove from My Contacts.”

Once you set up Sync, changes you make to your calendar or contacts are reflected on your device within minutes since the connection is over-the-air and always on. And it’s two way, so your calendar and contacts are always up-to-date, no matter whether you make changes on your phone or from your browser. Also, since your information is automatically backed up to your Google account, it’s securely stored even if you accidentally drop your phone in the pool. Getting your address book and calendar to a new phone is as easy as setting up Sync again.

if you want to try out Sync, point your mobile phone to m.google.com/sync.