I really hope this is the fourth and final part of a series I never planned to begin...
I have finally achieved sync up between google contacts and my 3G iPhone.
The (not wholly satisfactory*, but I'll live with it) solution to this problem reveals the core issue with the itunes/iphone experience currently for me.
I don't mind things going wrong. I get that we're living a life in beta. I am a fan of unfinished symphonies after all.
What I would like is a bit of a steer. Experimentation, playfulness, building as we go, is all fun if we can learn from our mistakes. But apple's error messages are not helping us learn. In fact, they are misleading. Read frustrating.
Every time I tried to sync my gmail contacts via itunes I got the message that my google password was incorrect. I was damn sure it wasn't. Some kind folk I know suggested I reset my password and retry. Nowt. Most people simply couldn't understand what could possibly be wrong. Many nodded, smiled knowingly and muttered N95 ( a clearly better visual content creator compared to the iPhone's superior visual content consumption).
When I gave it a final role of the dice last night at home itunes wouldn't open on my pc. Complete freeze up and worrying beeping noises.
When I restarted I tried to repair itunes. It said it had succeeded. It had not (those misleading error messages again).
So I uninstalled itunes, restarted (again) and reinstalled. And this time, this time! It worked. gmail synced up contacts. I even took the opportunity to whack a load of pics into the 16GB void.
The error was not that I didn't know my google password. It was that apple didn't know itunes was phucked.
Finally; 3G is working, itunes is working, syncing is working. At last my iPhone world is beginnning to smell of roses.
And it could have done so much faster and more easily if only apple's error messages were anywhere close to accurate. C'mon apple. Give us a clue!
The rest of the story?
*Not wholly satisfactory? Well, all my gmail contacts (which I synced from my N73 via Nokia PC Suite) are now in my iPhone... but every field bar the name has been aggregated into the iPhone contacts 'Notes' field. So I have email addresses, phone numbers et al - but I'd have to dial each number or type each email address to use it. Better than nowt... just.
The further ahead you look - the faster you go | davidpcushman AT gmail.com | These are my views and my views only.
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FasterFuture.blogspot.com
The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?
I am having the same experience. I can log into Gmail and check my contacts, but the same ID and password don't work in iTunes. I guess I need to update/repair iTunes. It should be simple (sync technology is hardly new), and it's pretty disappointing. C'mon, Apple!
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