What’s On Your iPhone? Plus, A Great Contacts Sync App

Aug, 2010

Earlier in the week, President Friedman dropped a comment about what is everyone’s favorite iPhone apps. Let’s see, I have 92 apps, including the ones that come with the iPhone.

Now, I used to sync my iPhone contacts, calendar, and notes up with the corporate laptop, and everything else with the personal. Of course, the corp PC is leased, and had to be changed, and, for whatever reason (IT had not a clue), the ability to login is hit or miss, something deep in the settings due to several different special versions of iTunes we use (activation only and demo content only), and they are not going to spend the time fixing. So, getting the iPhone re-synced up correctly is just not worth the time to go, erase, sync, set up, synch, fix on personal, blah blah blah. What I needed was a way of syncing contacts, basically for backup (I’ll get to calendar sync in a bit). I had a Mobile Me account provided for free by Apple, but, that’s expired, not sure if I want to pay the $99.

Syncing with Google Contacts just doesn’t seem to work using the Exchange method. Cable sync using iTunes to Windows Live Mail contacts only seems to pull from, not copy to Live Mail Contacts. So, after some hunting around, I ran across an app called Sync On The Go. Website is here. Some comments have said it doesn’t work well, but, I’ve been using it for a week, works just fine. You can add and delete at the website, as well as export and import. Give it a shot. There are a few more freebies at the iTunes store, such as Contacts Sync and PhoneCopy.

There is one other thing I might try, as there is a way to sync your Google Calendar up, which will sync over the air automatically. Mostly, I use my Blackberry on a enterprise server, but, for some meetings, we use a special type with which there is an iPhone app for connection, so you can see the presentation (plus, it makes it look like you are at your laptop when you are sitting at the beach….did I write too much? :)) So, for those who do not know this, you can go to your calendar and email the calendar event to the email on your iPhone, and it gets accepted. Or, add it to your Gmail calendar, and it will sync. You can do the same with your contacts, sending them as a Vcard. Lot easier than typing it in, eh?

Favorite apps:

Fluent News (and, yeah, I have a bunch of other news apps, too)
AccuWeather (I actually have 12 weather apps. Weird, eh?)
RSS Flash G
iHeart Radio
The official Twitter App
ScoreMobile
Justin.tv (I’ve watched live Devils games a few times on it)
Files (this one now costs $2.99, used to be $.99, but, it is worth it. Great protection, good for storing documents securely, as you can use a password on the iPhone. I use it for 1 file, which has all my usernames and passwords for websites and stuff, easier than re-entering in some other app.)
ZumoDrive – 1gb of offsite storage for free. Things like photos and non-secure docs. Putting music and vids for streaming, good luck with that.
Flickster – which tells me that, other than Resident Evil 4, movies are gonna such the rest of the year
Traffic – pretty good real time traffic
Where – for finding stuff, especially restaurants