If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch you’ll want the latest information that you have available on each one as well as on your laptop, work and home computer.  There are a number of ways to synchronise them, but here’s my suggestions as to the best solutions. I’ve choosen the best solution for each area that needs syncing. 

Address Book: Use MobileMe.

MobileMe provides simple and easy over-the-air automatic syncing of Address Book. It even syncs your Address Book photos! Read how to here.

iCal: Use Gmail

Gmail can sync calendar information very well. You can either share a calendar read-only so others can view it but not edit it, or you can do a full two-way sync across your own computers. Read how to here.

Notes: Use Notational velocity and Simple Note. Read how to here.

Mail Accounts: Setup your computer account using IMAP (not POP) then manually sync it across to your iPhone with iTunes using your USB cable. You only need to manually sync the setup ONCE, then the built in mail apps will automatically keep the email in sync. This is why you don’t need a MobileMe solution. All MobileMe does is sync the Mail Account information (username and password etc), it doesn’t sync the actual email.

ToDo lists

OmniFocus  is a great task manager with automatic syncing – I hope to do a review soon. Unfortunately ‘Things’ doesn’t have auto sync yet.

Tis approach means that you need to set up each area separately, but when it’s working, it’s great! Here is what the setup might look like on your iPhone, I’ve shown calendars (MobileMe) and contacts (Gmail).

Using MobileMe on the iPhone to sync JUST the Address Book

Using Gmail on the iPhone to sync JUST the Calendars

So you have two computers, one at work and one at home, and an iPhone and iPad  and you want the same contacts to be available to all of them.  The easiest way  to synchronise all your Address Book contacts is to use MobilMe. If you make a contact or edit a contact in one of your computers, is available to all your other computers. It’s not free though, will need to fork out and get a MobileMe account. Out of the box, your iPhone or iPad can synchronise to one computer for free –  but you physically have to plug it into the USB port and synchronise through iTunes.  You can synchronise  as many iPads or iPhones as you want to one computer  using this method.

It doesn’t take long to get tired of manually syncing your iPhone to your computer!  This is where you will need MobileMe. It’s Apple’s solution to the problem.

Simply sign up to MobileMe, and then in address book on your computer, go to preferences,  click on the accounts tab,  and click on synchronise with MobileMe.

Click on the MobileMe Button  and it will take you to a page where you need to put in your MobileMe username and password.

That’s it! Set up all your computers like this, and they will automatically synchronise to each other. If you put a new contact into one computer it will be on the other computer in a matter of minutes.

To set up your iPhone or iPad to synchronise as well simply go to Settings  from the home screen, and then select  ”Mail,Contacts,Calendars”.

Click on  ”Add new Account”

Click on  ”Mobile Me”

Click on  ”Add new Account” and enter your mobile me details.

Note – you can sync lots of things over Mobile Me – mail accounts, safari bookmarks, iCal calendars etc.  I don’t sync anything else over MobileMe  - just the address book. I found the MobileMe Calendar syncing to be problematic.

Here’s a post on how to sync your Calendars.

A very simple way to share your calendars across multiple macs and your iphone or ipad is to use Google calendar. The Google calender service is the easiest and most flexible free shared calendar service that I’ve found. Here’s how to set it up on a macintosh computer.

1. START A GOOGLE CALENDAR.
Go to google.com, and if you don’t already have one, create a gmail account. (Even if  don’t need to use gmail for email you still need to create a gmail account to sync your calendars using Google.)

Login to your gmail account, and select MORE – CALENDAR to start your own google calendar.

2. PUT YOUR GOOGLE CALNEDAR INTO ICAL
Go into ical and select ical – preferences.

Now select the ‘Accounts’ Tab, then click the + button to add an account.

Now select ‘Google’ under Account type, and then enter your gmail address and password.

That’s it. Press the create button and your gmail calendar will show up in ical. You can edit it, make changes, and it will automatically sync from google to ical.

NOTE: This only works in Snow Leopard. With  Snow Leopard syncing a gmail calendar is built into ical and it’s dead easy. (See  here for how to do it in Leopard, and this post for Google’s pre-leopard work-around. )

NOTE: How to share calendars as read-only. the above method will completely sync your information both ways. Any information edited on one computer will automatically copy across to the others. If you want the sharing to be one way only (for example to share a calendar with a friend but so that they cannot edit it, simply proceed as above on your computer, but then go into gmail, calendar settings, and get the calendar URL.  Copy the URL and in your friends ical select ‘Calendar’ and ‘Subscribe to Calendar’ and paste in the URL. This will allow them to see your calendar but not edit it.

See here for how to sync your Address book.

If you are moving from another mobile phone to an iPhone, if you first sync your old phone to your Address Book it will bring all your numbers into your iPhone. Likewise, you can copy all your address book contacts onto your mobile phone from your iPhone or Address Book.  Here’s how.

On your Mobile turn on bluetooth and make sure the phone is discoverable.

On your Macinotosh go to System Preferences:Bluetooth.

If it’s off turn it on.

Click on the + sign to add a new device.

Your phone should appear: select your phone.

You will get given a password on your screen and your mobile will ask for a password. Type it onto your phone.

Open iSync (Applications:Utilities:iSync)

select the menu Devices:Add Device

When the phone appears, double click it.

Now your phone will appear in the isync window. Set up the settings as you want them.

Finally click ‘Sync Devices’ and it will fill your phone with all your Address book contacts.

Here is a list of all the phones that will sync with iSync:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2824

plus these:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2520

I talked with Apple, they couldn’t help. I spend over and hour with the mobileme chat line, and subsequent e-mails and in the end I gave up.

This week I came across this great article which fixed everything! If you’re having issues with Apple address book definitely give this a try.

MobileMe doesn’t achieve this. iCal shared calendars via itunes doesn’t achieve this. After much experimenting I found the best way is through Google calendar.

Google calendar allows editing and viewing from iCal on your mac and from your iPhone, plus you can let anyone else edit your calendar if you want them to. So Google calendar becomes the hub. Here’s how it all works:

STEP 1. GET A GOOGLE CALENDAR ACCOUNT.
You can set up a new calendar in Google at http://google.com/calendar

STEP 2. SYNC ICAL WITH GOOGLE.
Google has released a program called calaboration that will automatically put all the settings for your Google calendar into iCal. Download and run calaboration. It looks like this, you just select the calendars you want to add into your iCal account.

STEP 3. SYNC IPHONE WITH GOOGLE

If you have iphone version 3 you can just use the built in CalDAV to access your Google Calendar. Go to Settings then Mail, Contacts, Calendars then Add Account then Other then Add CalDAV Account.
You’ll see a page like this:

Enter the settings for your google account here and that’s it!

NOTE – More than 1 Calendar.
If you have more than one Google Calendar you’d like to sync, you need to copy the URL of the calendar from ical across to your iphone. To do this, AFTER you have used callaboration to put the google settings into ical, go into ical, preferences, Accounts, Server Settings – it looks like this.

You need to type that URL into the ‘Advanced Settings’ – ‘Account URL’ of the Calendar on your iphone. It’s quite a long text so the easiest way is to copy it from ical into mail, mail it to your iphone, copy it out of mail and paste it in.

NOTE 2: Old iphone software.
If you have iphone software version 2 you’ll need to use Nuevasync. You set it up in your iPhone as a Microsoft Exchange server that points to Nuevasync. You can sync directly from google to iphone but all the calendars come across as one calendar. To choose which colors the calendars are on the iphone, you need to enable them one at a time from neuvasync, checking the iphone calendar each time, and they will import into the iphone in order of the following colors: red (first calendar) , orange (2nd) , blue, green then purple. eg the first calendar you enable will be red, and so on.

Well as great as the iphone is, the software is laggign a fair way behind and calendar syncign is one example.

After many hours, here’s a solution I found to sync multiple calendars across different computers, with anyone being able to edit the calendars, and see them on your iphone as well.

1. SET UP A MASTER CALENDAR Your master calendar needs to be in google (not on your mac). So create a google calendar here. Because I wanted to share it among my colleagues and have them edit it, I created a special goggle account just for this calendar. After you create the calendar you can export your existing  events from your mac as an ics file  and import them into google calendar.

2. SYNC IT TO ICAL Download a little google application called ‘Calaboration’ from here which will add your google calendar to ical. You will need to enter your google id and password. You will need to run Calaboration on any mac you want to access the google calendar on.

3. SYNC IT TO IPHONE Your iphone can sync to google calendar via the ClaDAV option on the iphone. Google is basically being an exchange server that your phone syncs to. The instructions are here.

I have a newer post about this here.