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IPhone,
Rants
I have to say, I love my IPhone. But I have to say I hate ITunes in general as half the time, it prohibits me in terms of usability, and causes more pain than it does good. There are many reasons why ITunes lacks usability and but I will not go into all that now. I’m focusing today on the Gmail contact sync in ITunes for IPhone.
The main issues I have with IPhone Sync & Google contacts are the following:
1) Whether you like it or not, ITunes syncs all contacts in all your Gmail contact groups, with no way whatsoever to control this
- Not just your main contacts, but also the following groups in addition to:
- Suggested Contacts
- Medical Contacts
- (If using the Google Medical app, this shows up in your Gmail contact groups)
- Most Contacted
(notice that the “Selected Groups” option is always grayed out above for Google Contacts)
Result: You have to go back and manually delete a lot of unwanted contacts in your IPhone. Nice! More work for me. Why in the world especially would I want my “Suggested Contacts” group automatically added Apple?
2) Whenever you sync your phone, ITunes gives you no real information on what contacts specifically it’s about to delete, add, etc.
Result: you are blindly synching your contacts here, unless you manually eye for eye go back and look at your Gmail account and compare the contacts in every contact group with your IPhone and try to figure out what it’s about to actually remove or add in ITunes. This is time consuming and completely useless. I once lost the majority of contacts on my Gmail account because of ITunes, because of this reason and I was not too happy.
Apple needs to do 2 things to make Gmail sync to IPhone usable:
1) Add an option to control what Gmail groups synced in ITunes
2) Somehow show a sync window in ITunes, where you can actually see what contacts from Gmail are about to be updated/deleted/added and the ability to uncheck or check those in ITunes before you go ahead with sync
Someone please let me know if Apple gets this right some day. Otherwise, I’ve turned off Gmail Sync, it’s worthless to me and just creates more work rather than me just updating my IPhone contacts by hand & play it safe. I end up saving time doing it by hand in the long run, than to deal with the ITunes sync problems stated above.
