Syncing Google Calendar to your iPhone

Filed under: Business, Internet, Productivity, Apple, Google

Syncing Google Calendar to your iPhone

by Chris Gilmer Jul 27th 2007

Perhaps one of the most important utilities on any mobile device nowadays is the calendar. Most people have to have their schedule wherever they are and get important notifications when something is upcoming.

With a large Gmail user base, there are plenty of different options for tying in Google Calendars with Blackberry's, Outlook, and other calendar applications. But what about tying in your Google Calendar to your iPhone? Well, it's pretty easy.

Visit your Google Calendar account and click on the Calendar Settings arrow under your "My Calendars"
Under the Private Address section, click on the "ICAL" button. This gives you a direct and private URL to your calendar. Copy this address.
Open your iCal application and navigate to Calendar > Subscribe. Then paste your Google Calendar URL in.

Once you have subscribed to your Google Calendar, sync up your iPhone and all of your events will drop into place. From now on your iCal will pull in all of your events during your set intervals.

There is also another option called Spanning Sync. ~~This application works through iTunes~~ and does require a $25 one year subscription plan, or $65 purchase. It offers a two way synchronization between Google Calendar and Apple iCal.

UPDATE: Thanks for the iTunes clarification St3phen.

Tags: apple, calendar, google, iphone, sync

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Marc Orchant said 1:23PM on 7-27-2007

I've been using Spanning Sync for months and it is a great solution for making sure everything (iPhone included) stays in perfect sync.

St3phen said 5:59PM on 7-27-2007

The application does not work through iTunes (as stated in the final paragraph). It syncs through Google Calendar's API through SpanningSync's intermediary service.

iTunes only gets involved with the syncing of iCal to the iPhone's calendar. It is otherwise uninvolved in the SpanningSync process.

Mapper99 said 11:25AM on 7-28-2007

Awesome solution! This works great!

Mapper.

http://iphone.corank.com

James said 6:04PM on 7-28-2007

It doesn't sync stuff you enter into the iPhone's calendar to Google Calendar though. You don't clearly mention that, only hint at the two-way syncing with the Spanning Sync

Eleventeen said 6:24PM on 7-29-2007

You can also try out GCalDaemon if you're in the more technically inclined set (read, Terminal friendly.)

It's a Unix program that has been ported, so there's little in the way of GUI, but if you don't mind following some simple prompts in Terminal, it's pretty easy to sync iCal and gCal both ways.

lovitts said 4:57PM on 9-06-2007

has anyone found a good way to sync google calendar w/iphone on windows? I'm especially interested in 2-way sync.

hominid said 5:26PM on 9-11-2007

i haven't tried it yet, still working up the nerve to tell my wife i'm buying an iphone, but supposedly the gdcaldaemon is a platform neutral java app. if it works for you, i'll have more ammunition for my side of the argument :)

phm said 1:17PM on 9-23-2007

does anybody else experience the same problem and is also not receiving any google calendar notification sms anymore? what can I do to fix this?

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