Syncing my iPod Touch with Google Calendar.

Posted on by Alex Schwartz

As I’ve been doing more to organize my life on area I’ve been having issues with was keeping my iPod Touch filled with all the relevant information it needed to keep going.  As long as I was syncing my touch with my Mac laptop this wasn’t much of a problem.  iCal reliably sync’d up with my Google calendars, but recently I’ve begun syncing my Touch with my PC desktop.  I found some instructions for turning the box the Touch comes in in to a dock.  I hate plugging and unplugging devices all the time so setting the dock up with my PC desktop made things more convenient for me and my little evolving home office.  However since there is no iCal for Windows I needed to find another way to keep my Touch up-to-date with my Google calendars.

I looked at some apps for the iPod Touch, but most were either costly, weren’t the greatest of calendars, were overly complex and relied on accounts with too many different services, or just plain sucked.  Recently I found a website, ironically it’s one of Google’s, that has step-by-step instructions for syncing the calendar on the iPod Touch with Google Calendar.  It uses the Exchange Server syncing ability of the Touch/iPhone platform to connect with your “calendar in the cloud”.  Unlike some of the other options it allows two way syncing over the air, so you’re not required to be connected to your computer in order to retrieve updated calendar information.  When I inputted a new entry on my iPod Touch, then checked iCal on my laptop less than a minute later the new entry appeared there.  Sure, you can just access your Google Calendars using mobile Safari, but if you don’t have an internet connection handy (or if you have an iPhone and you’re not in an area where you can get a signal) you can still have access to your calendar information.  This is why I prefer having an app as opposes as a purely web-based service.  It also sync’s your contacts as well.

I can’t say why I didn’t think of actually checking Google’s website first for a solution.  The iPhone OS has been around for awhile now and I can’t believe there wouldn’t be other people out there looking for the same thing that I was.  Now, however, I have all my devices sharing information between one another so that I can have my most updated information whether at home or on the road.

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