I have acquired, at least temporarily, a BlackBerry Curve 8330 for play; This was a great disappointment to more technical minded members of the family who wanted me to get a Storm or a Bold, but Sprint has neither, and at the moment I’m sticking with that service. The 8330 is old stuff — 6 months? a year? — and still stuck with Rev 0 EVDO instead of the Rev A that is available on Sprint, but I haven’t really played with a modern BlackBerry, so this should be an educational experience.
I’ll be writing a column about this, of course, but in the meantime, I’ll be posting problems and questions, in the hope that some reader will have some answers.
Syncing Events and Contacts from the Q to the Curve were of first consideraton. I had a backup program working on the Q, but, of course, that is not compatible with the Curve. GooSync here has a free service that syncs events with the Google Calendar to and from a variety of mobile devices. It works well. Just download an application to the Q, give GooSync your Gmail account name and password, and click the “sync” buton on the Q. (I recognize that this is a potential security problem. You might wish to invent a special password that you change to just before you sync, reverting to the old one immediately thereafter. This should alleviate most of your security concerns, if you are sufficiently paranoid to think that this English software company is just a front collecting Google Passwords.)
GooSync has two types of contact syncing: one to Google Mail, itself, and a second to a contact list on GooSync. If you wish to sync contacts, you have to pay — 19 British Pounds for a year. I gave them my credit card, and sure enough I was able to sync my Q’s contacts with a contact list on the Web site. (When I tried to sync to the Google web site, the program wanted to sync thousands of contacts, which is much more than I wanted or needed for a telephone list on the Curve.)
When I went to authorize the Curve on the GooSync site — GooSync can handle four different mobile devices — I discovered that the program wouldn’t work on the Curve, without an additional program, a SyncML — for Synchronize Markup Language — application. The company suggested a $40 download from a third party, but I was not about to pay that. It turns out there are free, Open Source equivalents from something called Funambol.Com, but there might or might not be problems with it and the BlackBerrys.
On the other hand, Google has a just released program to do just what I wanted to do:Synchronize Google Mail Calendar and Contact listings with BlackBerrys. SyncML is apparently built in. The only problem: those thousands of contacts on the my Gmail account.
There was an answer:
1. Create a new Gmail Account
2. Use GooSync to synchronize the Q contacts and eventswith the new account.
3. Call Sprint to change my line from the Q to the Curve;
4. Download and install the Google application to the Curve.
5. Synchronize Events and Contacts from the new Gmail account to the Curve
And there we were. No wires. No SyncML, and no additional cost other than that of GooSync, who I probably won’t need anymore. (Hmmm….they do have a 30 day “trial” with moneyback guarantee. Would it be ethical to take advantage of it? I really won’t need it anymore. Unless I switch back to the Q, of course.) And all my Q contacts on the Curve.
Next project: Accessing Google Mail from the Curve.
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