Calendar trials and the DROID

I do know that there are other types of phones besides the iPhone and the Android.

Blackberry comes to mind.

But as my friend Richard says, "I hear lots of people saying they like the Blackberry and couldn't live without it, but I LOVE my iPhone. I can't imagine living without it."

Having heard that over and over again, I was finally ready to make the leap but then at the last second chose the DROID.

I set my expectations low. I figured that if I could just get to "really like" with the DROID, that would be fine and then I'd go get an iPhone as well. That was an extravagant plan but I figured that I would view this as a professional investment.

First things first meant figuring out how to manage the DROID.

Even before I made the choice of the reasons I was attracted to the Android model was that the entire platform is truly internet based. Despite what platform(s) win in the short term, I am convinced that the "cloud" approach for data, synchronization, and more will all be "out there" and not constrained by passing information back and forth on cables to other devices.

I'm using the term "cloud" very loosely here as I don't want to digress into specific implementations and visions of how that would work.

In the case of the Android (the Verizon DROID for me), you can plug into your computer / laptop with a USB cable to charge and even to exchange data if you want to, but all the real work takes place over internet connections.

Initial startup of the phone requires having a Google gmail account. This also automatically provides a Google calendar, contacts, and so forth.

When you start the phone for the first time, it asks for your gmail account and password. After that, you're off and toddling along.

I've had a gmail account for over 4 years and had played around with a few other services like calendar but working full time as a consultant at Cisco meant that I had become quite anchored to Exchange. I rarely used my gmail account to send email. Instead, I used it as my backup system for personal email and my own consulting company email by bcc'ing my gmail account. That has proved to be a life saver several times.

Once the first baby steps of connecting and making the first call had passed came the significant challenge of synchronizing calendars and - to a lesser extent - contacts.

For me the calendar was the biggest thing that separated me from being OK to like to love with the DROID.

Everything went quite well with getting to the market, downloading some apps (all Free), trying out the camera, making calls... But calendar syncing remained a problem for about a week and reading the various postings on this were not providing insights.

Specifically, I was trying to sync my Outlook calendar at Cisco to the Google calendar. There is a built-in app for both direct Exchange email and calendar sync-ing, but as a consultant at Cisco I am not allowed an externally-facing Exchange account to do this. That's OK, it should have been possible to do this to the Android / Google calendar.

The Google calendar web site provides a sync client that can be downloaded to your Microsoft unit to handle synchronization with Outlook. It's very simplistic, rudimentary, and limited. It only wants to synchronize one Google calendar even though you might have several sub-calendars set up. It tends to die / hang every week or so, requiring a de-install and re-install on a regular basis. I'm told that Google has a professional version for corporate accounts. All I can say is: I should hope so.

That said, once I finally worked out the kinks - aside from the hanging and re-installations - it works rather well.

But those kinks!!

Part of the initial problem was that my Google calendar already had a few things in it. As it turns out the first sync is critical. After a few tries, I had quadruple and more duplicates in my calendar for every entry and the Google calendar had choked (no response from tech support on that either). I had so many entries in the Google calendar that I could even delete them.

1. Make sure that either your Google calendar or your Outlook calendar is empty. I finally got the nerve to go into "Settings" for the Google calendar and "Delete" it. I had worried that this would completely remove the calendar (another complaint: the term Delete isn't clear), but it only removed all the entries.
2. Next I had to manually clean out billions (so it seemed) duplicated and re-duplicated entries in my Outlook calendar. Hopefully you won't have to do this, but if you do, there are a number of little tricks with Outlook that can help.
3. Be sure to save your Outlook calendar locally in your My Documents. Just in case :-)
4. Now download the Google calendar sync client.
5. Set your first sync to be 1-way, Outlook to the Google calendar. Provide your gmail login information. DO NOT SET THE SYNC TO BE BOTH DIRECTIONS FIRST TIME.
6. Sync. That's to the Google servers. You should see the information appear on your "normal" browser view of your Google calendar right away. An additional sync will happen automatically from there to the phone.
7. In general, be very careful of messages that say things like "You have just removed [added / changed] 2,000 calendar entries. Do you want to proceed?" Unfortunately the answer might be either yes or no.

After a few minutes, check your Android / DROID. It might take 30 minutes or so the first time as there is probably a lot of data for the first sync.

Now you can set the sync to be both directions. And be sure to make sure the sync client hasn't gone belly up every couple of days.

You might think that after all of that that I hate my DROID. I don't. It came very, very close when I saw 10 duplicates of all my appointments appear. But after I had crossed this Rubicon, I felt it was functional and I could deal with it.

And then I remembered: Plaxo!!!!

Plaxo is another networking site but as far as I am concerned, it's biggest plus is excellent multi-calendar and contacts synchronization. It wasn't particularly great when I started using it. I wanted a network-based calendar and was sort of torn between Google and Plaxo. Over time, Plaxo has developed into a really solid tool for synchronizing. It isn't perfect, but it is head and shoulders over the Google calendar sync tool.

I now have a Plaxo client on my Mac which then syncs to my iPod touch. Meanwhile, the Mac updates with Plaxo, which in turn will sync with multiple Google calendars and my Outlook calendar and put that all into separate personal calendars in Outlook. Every so once in a while, I have to remove a device / calendar endpoint and then set it up again, but lately that has been rare.

And Plaxo has a little utility to remove duplicates. Great feature. And of course this all includes contacts as well.

My only complaint about Plaxo is that it tends to put the birthdays of people in my contacts into my calendar. Sorry. I am not a birthday type of person. Unless you are a blood relative, I don't care.

I even got good technical support from Plaxo when they had a screen painting glitch.

After a struggle for a week or so, I finally settled in and started to really enjoy my DROID. I'm not sure I could LOVE any of these devices, but this definitely works for me.

Next up: iPhone / Touch and next steps on the DROID