An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

I had used Remember the Milk (RTM) in the past but had recently switched to Toodledo mainly for the native iPhone support (through Appigo’s ToDo and then Toodledo’s own iPhone app) plus to try out a different web interface, however RTM just also released a native iPhone application so I have now switched back as their app is by far the best I’ve used on the iPhone!

Lately at work I’ve been using an iPhone application named Ambiance to provide me with some ambient sounds while I work on critical tasks and I must say it has worked wonders with my productivity! Of course you don’t need an iPhone app to play ambient sounds like rain falling with wind in the background or waves gently hitting the beach but Ambiance just makes it handy.

Lately I have been looking for ways to keep my life better organized as I really am hopeless when it comes to planning things and getting things done so I had a goal to sync all my calendars together so they were available from wherever I wanted them. Seeing how I recently purchased a Treo 750 my first thoughts leaned towards setting up a MS Exchange account online but I just couldn’t bring myself to use Exchange for my personal account as well as at work so next I thought about Google Calendar.

The first step I went through to sync my life with Google Calendar was to use the excellent Spanning Sync to sync my Mac Book Pro’s iCal with my Google Calendar, that then allowed me to use Missing Sync to sync my Treo with my Mac. This kept everything in sync well enough but I only use the Mac when I’m at home and having to connect to it to sync up my calendar was a real pain, this led me to search for alternatives to sync my Google Calendar directly with my Treo over the air….

At first I purchased GooSync as it seemed the better option and the freeware worked fine for me first time where for some reason OggSync didn’t work first go around as the .NET framework failed to install (I suspect that was user error as I think I may have selected the wrong .cab file to download). However I didn’t like the way that GooSync handled my different Google Calendars on my Treo as it simply prefixed the event summary with an abbreviated name of the Google Calendar instead of using categories and plus there was no support for automatic syncing in the background.

That led me to give OggSync another go, this time around ensuring I installed the right version of the .NET framework and with a successful run of using the freeware version I decided to give the commercial version of OggSync a go, which was successful except for an issue with the timezone of one of my calendars in Google Calendar that I had to resolve. OggSync supports the different calendars as they should be handled by using your Google Calendar names as categories and it also supports automatic background syncing to a schedule that you can set yourself.

Needless to say I have canceled my GooSync subscription and have requested a refund as it just didn’t suit my needs where GooSync suits my needs a lot better and I highly recommend it if you want to sync your Windows Mobile based device with your Google Calendar over the air!

I currently use Entourage on my Mac for my work’s MS Exchange based calendar but am looking at unifying my calendaring into Google Calendar but don’t actually want to synch the two but rather just have a way to easily add an existing event from Entourage into one of my Google Calendars so it gets on my radar. Does anyone know a way to do that?

If there is a way to do it with MS Outlook but not with Entourage then I may look at just running Outlook in Parallels instead of using Entourage but would have to wait until I am more local to my Exchange server to do that initial synch as it would take forever on my current internet connection.

Ultimately I want iCal to display all of my events but leave my work calendar out of the synch process, at the moment I just manually add the events to gCal or forward the email to my Gmail account then add it using the provided link but that is a real pain and it would be great if I could get a “Add to Google calendar” link in Entourage itself in either the event or the invite to the event.

My return to Houston is only 2 weeks away now and during my absence the long awaited release of the Treo 750 took place so now I am wondering if I really should run out to Cingular as soon as I get back and grab myself one? Heck if I decide to purchase one and there is a Cingular store at the airport (LAX or IAH) then I will probably grab one there!

I guess my main concern about it is the battery life as I will be a pretty heavy user of the 3G for web browsing and email so does anyone have personal experience with the 750 and it’s battery life? I mean from actually using it and not reading about it on some website!

I have really missed having a smartphone over here in Perth as I often go to check something on the web like a review for a product I am thinking of getting as an impulse buy or just checking the score on the cricket! My Treo 650 isn’t going to last much longer as it has seen quite a beating mainly due to the silly external antenna catching on things and launching itself out of my holster before exploding on the floor, I lost the stylus from one such incident!

There just seems to be a huge lack of 3G smartphones available in the States unless you are willing to pay the premium and get an imported phone so the Treo 750 seems like it is just about the only real choice as the others are either too bulky eg. the 8525 or don’t have a touch screen eg. the Blackjack.

Poll:
[poll=2]