How to use iSync to sync your Address Book with Google without an iPhone (hint: it is painful)
I guess I should have expected this to be a complete and utter pain, but damn. Apparently the only way iSync will even function is if you have added a device. It doesn’t have to be currently connected, but you just have to have added a device to iSync at some point in time, then the damn thing magically works. Then it gives you a big warning message about how iSync failed because the device wasn’t connected. Yet if you go look on your remote syncing site (like Google, Yahoo or whatever) you will see that the data was indeed synced.
To even get Address Book to allow you to attempt to sync with Google (without an iPhone) requires manipulating a plist. That’s awesome.
Here’s the steps:
- Edit the iPod plist to enable Google syncing (search for it)
- Open Address Book preferences, now you have a “Sync with Google” option. Fill it out.
- Open up iSync and add a device if you don’t have one already. If you do not have a device that iSync will talk to, and cannot dig one up, then you are done. You could probably just borrow somebody’s phone since all you have to do is get ANY phone in there. Once you add the phone, I recommend turning bluetooth off so you don’t push any changes to that device (unless you really want to).
- Click Sync Devices, you will probably get an error telling you Synchronization failed but it didn’t. Not as far as the Address Book is concerned anyway.
Everything about this process is wonky. Why do I have to add a throwaway device to sync my address book from my computer to gmail? That makes no sense.
It’s unclear to me so far how frequently my address book is synced, but I don’t mind clicking “Sync now” once a week or so.
Oh yeah, of course the G1 is not visible to iSync so therefore when you try to add this device to iSync so that you can get your Address Book synced with Google, it will fail. Guess keeping 4 year old phones around comes in handy after all.
