Google Calendar Sync for the Blackberry

The one ugly point in my digital lifestyle on my Blackberry has been calendar synchronization. I use Google Calendar to manage my schedule, and our family uses the shared calendar features to keep everyone on the same page while still being able to separate events as needed.

As noted previously, there hadn’t been a good synchronization solution for Blackberry users with Google Calendars. I’d been using gSyncIt which worked, but required a clunky three-way synchronization with Outlook in the middle.

Until today, when Google announced Google Sync, which lets me synchronize my Blackberry with Google Calendar, over the air, in real time.

It’s fairly straightforward… install the sync app on your phone, give it your Google credentials, and it’ll perform an initial sync. You can set options for whether you want it to synchronize automatically (which means every 2 hours, or anytime you update something on the Blackberry) or manually. You can download any number of Google calendars that you use, although you can only make Blackberry updates to your primary calendar (presumably because there is no way to indicate which calendar you’d want to use when entering an event in the Blackberry calendar app).

I didn’t run into any problems other than a couple of recurring events that had exceptions that didn’t sync 100% smoothly and created a couple duplicate events. Fortunately the Sync app allows you to clear the Blackberry and force an authoritative sync from the server, meaning that if things get messed up you can wipe the slate clean on one side.

I’m happy because I no longer have to do a desktop sync with Outlook just to get calendar entries moved. My wife is happy because now I can sync her calendar too, and she doesn’t have to remember to enter shared events onto my calendar. Life is grand.

Time will tell how things work long-term, but it’s great to see new options for increasing productivity. No word yet on which other devices might be supported in the future.