Over the past couple of weeks, Google has been releasing interesting new stuff at such a furious pace that I’m getting short of breath just trying to keep up. It’s now released a new version of its formerly BlackBerry-centric Google Sync service that syncs calendars and contacts between Google’s Web-based services and an iPhone or Windows Mobile-based phone. It’s both a free alternative a large chunk of Apple’s for-pay MobileMe service and an answer to Microsoft’s My Phone, even though that service hasn’t launched yet.
It’s also leaving me with a serious case of deja vu: Google’s new syncing features are practically identical to Nuevasync, a service I’ve been using recently to juggle information between Google and my iPhone. (Both services do their syncing via Microsoft’s Exchange technology.) Nuevasync’s a small outfit with a solid service, so I immediately began to worry on their behalf, thinking that the 800-pound Google gorilla had just rendered it superfluous. The company has an optimistic post up about all this, saying that it plans to offer far more features (including task syncing, a feature I’ve been pining for ever since I discovered Apple hadn’t bothered to implement it in MobileMe).
I’m glad to see Google taking calendar syncing seriously, since its browser-based mobile version of Google Calendar is pretty rudimentary. But I’m sticking with Nuevasync for the moment. I’ve wasted enough hours of my life fiddling with persnickety syncing tools (and sometimes losing data to them) that I don’t wanna mess with a setup that seems to be working just fine.