While many people, including myself, can find plenty to gripe about with Outlook & MS Exchange , one thing that is rock solid is the over-the-air syncing with BlackBerry devices. Both email and calendar appointments sync fairly effortlessly and reliably.
In the non MS Exchange world syncing hasn’t been so easy, especially on the Mac side of the world. But with a bit of testing that I did recently with the google calendar mobile sync I think I’m finally in good shape.
Here is my setup.
– for contacts: The Plaxo Mac OS X app keeps my OS X address book and plaxo.com in sync. My contacts don’t sync over the air to my BlackBerry curve, but when I plug my blackberry in to charge ( using a USB cable ) I run PocketMac which then syncs the contacts. I expect a plaxo blackberry sync client to come out in the future.
– for email: The blackberry push email system does this all automatically, so no need to do anything extra.
– for calendar: This was a serious pain point for me. I use Google Calendar and for the last few months I’ve been forced to basically use the WAP site for Google Calendar when I was on the go. It worked OK, but it meant no offline support. Now that Google Sync has been released my calendar updates in real time on my Blackberry — and works the other way — updating Google Calendar OTA if I make changes on my BlackBerry.
So there you have it. Definitely not as elegant as it could be, but finally everything is in sync !
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
very helpful. thanks.
Funny, Raanan.
You and I must have been twins separated at birth.
I do all the IMAP/Gmail/Google Apps stuff you talk about in another post, and all this plaxo/mac/Google syncing as well.
Oh man, am I glad to see the back of MS Exchange and all that.
But isn’t it amazing how far this technology is moving so fast.
Sheesh… if this stuff is turning me on I’ve been hanging with the geeks a little tooooo long!
– Alister
Hey Thanks for sharing 😉
I was just hoping that things had improved, since 4 years ago, when I last tried to get google calendar and Plaxo contacts to do any real kinda syncing.. So glad it finally works 🙂
Now I can’t wait to start doing more with these contacts, and start organising my information streams based on the placement of my contacts in my social graph 😉
Plaxo is AWFUL. To use Comcast Address book you are forced to sync with Plaxo and it does not allow you to have multiple contact information (email addresses & address), sorts by first name, not company or last name. How can you work with a system like this. Also they do not protect you from address harvesting. These programs are only designed for social networking and leaves people who need it for business out in the cold.
I am completely lost trying to use a decent webmail carrier that I can statisfy my needs while traveling.
I’ve heard some people having issues with Plaxo — but for me it worked well back when I needed to sync things from Outlook/BlackBerry to Google/Blackberry. There are now a few other options including the Google Sync suff on iPhone: http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html