Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support | Hacker News Reader

Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support

googlemobile.blogspot.com

76 pointsamitry25 comments

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the iPhone instructions (http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html#p=apple) tell you to add an Exchange (ActiveSync) account in your iPhone settings, rather than modify your existing Gmail account.

This is fine and dandy, unless you already have an Exchange account configured, e.g. for your work email. When I went to add another Exchange account, my iPhone told me that "Only one Exchange ActiveSync account can be configured."

Maybe there's a way around this, but Google's dire warnings suggest there isn't ("Important! Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPhone, existing data may be removed from your phone.")

I'll be Googling for a while, but helpful suggestions are appreciated.. (and no, 'suck it iPhone n00b' is not helpful... :))

The problem is that it appears Google is using ActiveSync. ActiveSync allows you to sync calendars and contacts as well as your email; so you run into a contention problem - which account is the winner for your calendar? For your contacts? Etc, etc.

It would be nice if the iPhone would let you pick which account owned which data, but I don't think it's sophisticated to do that right now.

So; if you really want to use Google's ActiveSync OVER your exchange server's ActiveSync, you may be able to configure your Exchange account to use IMAP instead of ActiveSync. I don't think you'll have any luck with 2 ActiveSync accounts for the time being.

(For whatever it's worth, I'm in the same position as you; if anyone hears about a way to get multiple ActiveSync accounts running, I'd also love to hear about it.)

The Palm Pre does this nicely already. I wonder if there is some sore of licensing situation that is preventing Apple from implementing multiple exchange accounts or Apple just doesn't think that their customers need multiple accounts.

> The Palm Pre does this nicely already.

Yeah but the Pre is based on the idea that your data lives everywhere but on your phone, so it's setup to handle multiple sources of everything and merging them correctly.

The iPhone's software was built with the idea that you have one central identity server (either your mac or an exchange server), so it handle multiple "main" sources… not at all.

I would guess it's the latter. I mean.. we don't even have MMS yet, and it was huge news when we got copy & paste.

I can use MMS (and tethering) on my iPhone with Rogers in Canada.

> Perhaps I'm missing something, but the iPhone instructions (http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html#p=apple) tell you to add an Exchange (ActiveSync) account in your iPhone settings, rather than modify your existing Gmail account.

You aren't. The goal is to have push gmail, and Apple's gmail client doesn't handle push. So the choices are mobileme (which Google can't access), Yahoo Mail (same) or ActiveSync.

Now, if I could only have more than one Exchange account on my phone.

Why would anyone want to be notified whenever they get an email? People are already incessantly and compulsively checking their email every few minutes, to the detriment of their sociability.

This makes email less fun. The few seconds of anticipation when you hit the refresh button on the email client and it starts downloading emails are enthralling; Did that girl from Match.com reply? or is it yet another spam from Amazon/Dell?

I hate the idea of being notified of each individual message. Considering how often it's an automated e-mail or somebody copying me in to something rather than something actually useful... well, for my use of e-mail it's a pointless distraction.

Still, I wouldn't mind having the unread count on my iPhone's Mail icon be accurate, instead of a half-hour out of date. I'll probably enable this sometime soon and continue to leave new mail notifications off.

I've found that push-style notifications actually make me check things less, not more. I hit refresh on Twitter every few minutes 'till I turned on SMS, I kept popping gmail tabs open every 5 minutes until I eventually just left the tab running in the browser window. I kept checking blogs every day until I found RSS.

Now I don't have to visit those places all the time, they bring the info directly to me.

How to sync multiple calendars with iphone for Google Apps

http://www.knowliz.com/2009/02/how-to-sync-multiple-calendar...

Just enabled it on my iPhone. Verified with test emails. Joy...1 year and 2 months delayed.

Yes, just started working for me too.

Thanks!

And so drop the start ups that tried to mimic push email with push notifications..

As if they didn't see this coming...

* I would hold off on adding this to your iphone for now. It's very slow and buggy.

502 Server Error when trying to set it up on the iPhone...

Emails are very slow to load on my iPhone, and my contacts still haven't synced. Kind of crappy really.

EDIT: It updated my contacts and email seems to be working alright after about a half hour or so. I assume Google is just getting slammed by iPhone users at the moment.

The messages in my "All Mail" folder appeared after a fairly long delay, but I'm still not getting any messages appearing in my Inbox.

I wonder if this is related to the fact that my Blackberry hasn't received any of my Gmail messages since this morning

Same here, and probably.

Not bad, except it does the Gmail "delete" = "archive" thing. Any idea how to make "delete" = "delete"?

Gmail labs advanced imap controls lets you configure that. I'm not sure if it will work with this though.

I'm finding that even with my Nokia S60 phone ("not yet supported" according to the Google PR stuff) I'm getting Gmail pushed to my device. Worth trying if you haven't already.

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