 |
More of my sitesWinInfo Daily News
|
About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Sunday, July 08, 2007iPhone synching woesI desperately want to give the iPhone a proper review, I do. The problem is, the buggy little device won't work consistently enough for me to remain all that positive about it. Case in point: Sync. It's been a complete disaster.I initially attached the iPhone to my Vista Ultimate-based Media Center PC, my main desktop machine, and the place where my master music and photo libraries are stored (and, in the case of music, managed via iTunes). The Media Center PC has been quite reliable and stable, and it's been blasting recorded TV shows and other content over the network to an Xbox 360 Media Center Extender in the living for about eight months without a major hiccup. This should work fine, right? On Windows, the iPhone supports contacts syncing from Yahoo! Contacts, Outlook, and Windows Contacts, but it only offers Calendar syncing from Outlook. Since my contacts are available in Outlook format, and it's easy enough to subscribe to Google Calendar (which I use for my scheduling needs), I chose Outlook for both. I ultimately turned off email syncing (since I use Web-based Gmail) and toggled between Safari and IE bookmark syncing, just to see how it works. (The lack of any Mozilla facilities on the iPhone is, of course, disturbing.) Here's what happened: Contacts. Contacts syncing worked just fine and I could access all my needed phone numbers via the iPhone's Phone application. Calendar. Calendar synching never worked. In iTunes, you can supposedly choose between "All calendars" or a list of calendars from which you can select the calendars you want to sync. Despite the fact that Outlook has multiple calendars, one of which is local (the cunningly named "Calendar") and one of which is the subscribed Google Calendar, the "Selected calendars" choice is grayed out an unavailable. But here's the thing: I know it works, because my various Outlook calendars are choosable on the iPod's sync page in iTunes. So they work there but not on the iPhone. Irritating? You bet.  Email. Never attempted and never will. Bookmarks. This worked fine from both IE and Safari, but created folders in the iPhone's Safari browser, requiring me to navigate down to find the bookmarks. Yugh. Not useless, but close. Sync is not two-way, however: If you create bookmarks on the phone, they don't appear in the synced desktop browser. iPhone-based Photos. If you take photos with your iPhone and connect it to the PC, the Windows application for acquiring photos is supposed to start up, allowing you to download the photos to the PC. This never worked on the Media Center PC. In order to see what a real sync experience was like, I tried the Mac next. When I first connected the device to the Mac, iPhoto popped up, allowing me to download those photos I couldn't get to on the PC, which was nice. Then I restored the iPhone and started over. Here's what happened: Contacts. You can choose between Mac OS X's Address Book application and Yahoo! Contacts, but on the Mac, you get one additional feature: You can sync your Yahoo! Contacts list with Address Book as part of the synchronization pass, which I chose, thus populating Address Book on the Mac with a relatively up-to-date copy of my contacts list. The iPhone-based Contacts list worked properly as well. Calendar. I subscribed to Google Calendar with Apple's iCal application and was able to choose just that calendar to sync with via iTunes. Finally, I could see my schedule on the iPhone. It's pretty attractive looking. Email. Never attempted and never will. Bookmarks. Here, the Mac is actually more limited than the PC: You can only sync with Safari, with the same hierarchical folder issues noted above. Not to belabor the point, but I'd really, really like to see Mozilla support here. iPhone-based Photos. Photo importing always worked fine. When I had taken photos on the phone and the connected it to the Mac, iPhoto would pop-up to download them. Syncing with a Mac is cute, and I'm glad I could test it, but the reality is, I live in a Windows world, as will most iPhone users. So I turned to my latest notebook, a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running Windows Vista Ultimate. The sync results, alas, were similar to the Media Center PC. (Maybe it's an Outlook 2007 issue?) Further problematic: The iPhone's Wi-Fi will no longer connected to my home network for some reason. I type in the passcode and it says it cannot connect. My notebooks all work fine, and the iPhone worked fine previously. Maybe another restore will fix that, but for now, here are the sync results: Contacts. Works similarly to the Media Center PC. Calendar. As with the Media Center PC, I can't choose between my various Outlook-based calendars as the choice is grayed out. However, when the default choice (all calendars) is selected, the iPhone did sync with an old and out of date copy of my calendar that is in the default Outlook Calendar (again, named "Calednar"). So it sort of worked, but won't see other calendars, including a second local calendar I created for testing. Email. Never attempted and never will. Bookmarks. Works similarly to the Media Center PC. iPhone-based Photos. This time, photo importing did work, which was welcome, and Vista's built-in photo acquisition utility does appear when I connect the iPhone with fresh photos to download. Overall, the sync experience has been exasperating. The only time it worked correctly was on the Mac, go figure, and I can't see myself using that as my central management point for contacts and calendar. (And while I didn't really discuss this aspect of it here, I had to copy over my iTunes library to the Mac to get music, podcasts, and videos on the device. I'm not going to keep that up-to-date on the Mac over time either.) What's needed here, obviously, is better compatibility with existing solutions (Outlook, primarily) and compatibility with a much wider range of email, calendar, and browser applications. Mozilla support should be obvious, but what about supporting popular Web-based services like Google Calendar too? I realize the iPhone is a 1.0 product, but fixing these issues and increasing compatibility should be Job One for whoever at Apple is working on this part of the iPhone and iTunes. It's a huge problem. Labels: iPhone [ Posted at 11:45 AM | Permalink ]
|
|
Nexus Home | Nexus Archives | Email Paul
|