Our sibling site, Android Central, brings word we’d almost given up faith at ever being brought’ned. Google apps, including the Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk we love so much on the iPhone (and iPod touch), are out of beta and high on life! Google’s own blog explains-ish:
We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase. So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.
Makes the kind of sense that doesn’t, but whatever. Opaque, non-standard definitions of beta aside, it’s still good news. What’s next, announce a second operating system or something?
Here’s a welcome surprise for you: Google has now created Google Sync for iPhone so that you can sync up your Google Contacts and Google Calendar. They are doing it by making their data look like an Exchange server — meaning that if you’re not already using Exchange on your iPhone for work, you can point it at Google’s servers (see full instructions here) to get your contacts and calendars pushed out to you. Nice? Nice.
Of course, if you’re already using Exchange for work but still want to get your Google data on your iPhone, you’d going to need to get a solution to sync your Google data down to your desktop and then get it from your desktop to your iPhone either via USB tether or via MobileMe. You can learn more about how the two work together in Rene’s excellent article on that very subject.
Now, Google, just get Gmail to look like Exchange and we’ll be happy campers. Actually, you know what, just fix IMAP, that’ll be enough.
Quick Update: As I just noted over at WMExperts, Google licensed Exchange Active Sync (EAS) from Microsoft, which is a shot at RIM but also, maybe, a shot at Apple. Rene just pointed out to me that given all of Google’s recent moves with the CalDAV/iCal system, they might have kept on pushing to make the stuff that Mac uses the industry standard. Instead, Google and Microsoft are suddenly working together on using EAS.
Google has dropped the iCal bomb. That’s right. Buh-bye third party intermediaries, hello built-in Google Calendar support for Apple’s open source CalDAV standard:
The Google Calendar team is proud to announce the public release of our support for the CalDAV protocol. You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you’re offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers.
You can get both the setup program and the download from Google code source. (Now if we could only get some similar Google love for CardDAV as part of a Google Contacts revamp…)
If anyone has a chance to try it out, let us know how it works for getting your gCal into MobileMe or onto your iPhone (I’m — right now very sadly — transitioning to the HTC FUZE for the Round Robin, so let me live vicariously through you!)
