So you have Google with all the software needed to replace Outlook in every respect except syncing contact and calendars to an iPhone or a Blackberry and you have Apple with a great device and an opportunity to wean thousands of small and mid size companies off of Exchange offering an inadequate alternative to Exchange. Neither company has built a solution for real users. It’s as if the railroads had decided to end their tracks about a 100 yards from each other rather than meeting at Promontory Point and driving the golden spike. Dumb.

He’s soooooo right. Why can’t Apple support all the Google APIs that correspond to the functionality in Exchange server? It’s all there and free to build against, and for a small business, Google Apps + iPhone (with Google support) would be absolutely killer. I switched from a Blackberry (Pearl) to the iPhone 3G, and I’ll never look back, but having calendar, contacts, and mail all synced to my phone is just huge.

However…

I just got bombed in the way Marty says isn’t possible: Nuevasync stopped working correctly for me. It fails to synchronize my contacts, reporting that my google account has corrupt data. They advised me to export all my contacts, delete them, and re-import them. I followed the instructions and didn’t read the fine print: Google contact export doesn’t retain grouping metadata, so if you do what I did and just export ‘All Contacts’, you lose group metadata. Losing track of your groups is bad enough, but also: all your ‘Suggested Contacts’ also become ungrouped, so I had 500+ contacts, more than half of which were junk.

Anyway, after I re-imported my 500+ contact list (with no groups), Nuevasync still doesn’t work. I emailed their support address, and I got a form reply (which is typical, no problem there), but after several days, I didn’t get any further response from a staff member, so I emailed back again, and I still have yet to hear from them. In the meantime, I have zero contact data on my phone because all my contacts were previously synchronized (which was fabulous!).

I really just don’t know what to do at this point. I don’t want to switch to GooSync because a) it isn’t free, and b) there’s no way to try before you buy, and it looks like you have to download a special iPhone app for syncing. Does that integrate well with the Apple Contacts and Calendar apps? It doesn’t look like it from what I can tell, but….I can’t really tell unless I fork over $15 for the iPhone app and £20 for the SyncML service.

I really just want Nuevasync to help me, because their service worked like a charm up until this point.

Update: Through a comment on their blog, David indicated that there will be some kind of support in the status pages to help pinpoint exactly what data isn’t parsing correctly in the sync.