Google Calendar and Palm Pilots

So yesterday I was digging around through a few boxes and I stumbled upon my PalmOne LifeDrive again. It's a Palm Pilot with WiFi on it and a 4GB harddrive, plus an SD Card to download pictures from your camera, or just expand the storage further.

So I formatted the LifeDrive and put it back to it's factory state again, updated the PalmOS, and then thought it would be cool if I could sync the thing to my Google Calendar.

I'm a huge fan of Google Calendar because of it's easy to use interface, notifications, sharing, invites and the SMS's and daily morning e-mails. But one thing I was missing was the ability to jot down events, times, and info and have it reflected on Google.

So I started a web search and there seems to be a couple ways to go about doing this. First, there is a website called GooSync which pretty much does everything I want, however if you have more than one calendar you have to sign up for the premium account. So as long as you have only one calendar it's a great option, I have about 4.

So next idea is the CompanionLink for Google application which after a few hiccups in the configuration worked out beautifully. This program runs about 30 dollars but has a free trial. The one problem I had was when I sync'd I started to get many many duplicate events in my calendar. This really pissed me off because trying to go delete about 400 bogus events was time consuming. There seems to be a little bit of a glitch if you setup the default calendar where downloaded events get set as unfiled in Palm Desktop causing the next sync to upload those events as new events on your Web Based calendar.

So the work around I did was create yet another Bogus calendar, set that as the default and the rest of them worked just fine from that point on. So I'm quite happy with the way it all worked out and one thing that I was surprised about was the way it actually updates your contacts on Gmail to reflect your Palm address book. How sweet is that!