tech-tag

Getting the cell phone calendar in sync

June 19th, 2006

An overview of how simple standard cell phones can be synchronized with calendar apps

Most current cell phones contain an embedded calendar. Even though this seems like a useful feature it has little value in my eyes if it can’t sync with external calendars like Sunbird, Outlook and Google Calendar, since it is just too unhandy to constantly edit events and Todos on the cell phone. But on the other hand a handheld calendar which syncs with my calendar on the pc’s seems very attractive to me.

There are of course a lot of cell phones, differentiating in any number of ways. But there still seems to be some similarities when. This will be based with my experience with my Nokia 6610i an older Sony Ericsson T68i and a Siemens M55, but I believe that this apply to a wider array of phones.

Syncing a cell-phone an external calendar can basically go on in two different ways. Either the cell-phone can connect directly with the computer, or they can both act as clients to an internet server.

Syncing directly with the computer

Synchronising thru a direct connection is free (once any needed hardware is obtained). But require that you are close to the computer, and that this is running with the right software setup.

The way to do this is often via cable or wireless connection, where the most common are the ageing IRDA standard and BLUETOOTH.

The IRDA standard is an infrared connection. The advantage is that these are often supported by older hardware, but the connections are often slow, and require the phone to be within very short range of the pc pointing exactly right. On the phones I’ve tried i has been fairly easy to establish a connection with Windows XP and the software made available by the manufacturer. The only hitch is that in every case (the 6610i and the T68i) the connection did not function until I had limited the connection speed to 115 kbps. This is done by entering the System in the Windows control Panel (classical view) and selecting the hardware tab, and then opening the device manager. In the device manage you find the infrared connection, and there it should be fairly easy to find the max. allowed connection speed. I sometimes use this kind of connection to get the pics on my cell phone downloaded or backing up the contacts list. But in my mind the infrared connection is to complicated and slow for daily sync’ing with the calendar app.

With BLUETOOTH one overcomes some of the weaknesses the infrared connection has. If one has a BLUETOOTH enabled phone (like the T68I), and a computer with either an internal or an external BLUETOOTH adapter it makes faster, and more solid connection than the infrared connection. A BLUETOOTH connection also works within a lot wider range (up to 100 meters depending on equipment).

My complaints about the direct connection is that one is locked to on specific computer, that the software from the phone manufacturer often only supports Outlook and that it often takes a lot of clicks every time they sync. Another objection which concerns me but might not concern all, is the software often only is available in Windows versions.

Syncing indirectly via a server

As stated above the other way to go, is to synchronize using an external server which both the PC and the Cell phone syncs with. In order for this to work, the phone needs access to the internet in order to sync with the server, the best options I know of is either 3G or GPRS, which are both non-dialup connection types, where the expenditure is on the bandwidth usage. 3G is the newest and fastest of the two, but the phones are still pretty expensive, and I have not had access to an enabled phone so I can’t say a lot. The other way to go is GPRS, all the phones mentioned here were GPRS enabled, and it seemed pretty easy to get it working by help from the network provider’s website.
Compared to the direct connection this also means that there will be an additional expenditure every time the calendar is sync’ed, since the network providers charge for bandwidth usage. But during my trials it did not seem that this was very much.

The phones I’ve tried all were able to act as a syncml client sync’ing with a syncml server. It takes about 5 minutes to set the phone up to sync via syncml, and a sync takes about 15-20 seconds. With this setup it is possible to sync with the home compute, using the free funambol ad-on for outlook, or any of the other syncml clients/ad-ons.

It does seem, that syncml servers are hard to find. One possibility is to set one up on the home computer, software for this can be downloaded from funambol. But then the home computer has to be running in order to sync, and access to the Calendar is only possible from the home computer or the phone. All in all on get the same as with the direct connection, but at a a little bit higher price.

If one has a web hosting account it should be possible to set up a server syncml on this. I have found two free software solutions for this. For those who master php, it is possible to incorporate Nicolas Bougues syncml tools in a webapplication, or just use it as a simple server. An other way to go is to install egroupware groupware server on the server. I have not made any of these work but this is probably due to the fact that my hosting account has php safe_mode set to on. But i plan to purchase another one and try them again. I plan to make a post about this later.

The last possibility, I know of, is to make a free account at a web site like ScheduleWorld, they provide free access to a syncml server, a very nice webinterface, and an advanced java-calendar app, and it syncs with Google Calendar. With this server it does not take very long to get the syncing up an running, but the disadvantage is that they plan to put in ads via events in the calendar.

All in all I prefer the sync’ing through a server, but this is of course not the only way to go. Right now I personally use ScheduleWorld, but I the day I get a server up and running on my hosting account I will probably be using it.

If you feel that, anything in the above is inaccurate or wrong, or there is something you need deepened, or your have any other reason, don’t hesitate to make a comment.

Entry Filed under: Calendar, Cell phone, google calendar, tech