Sync Your iPhone Contacts Wirelessly With Gmail

I’ve come across a few tweets and Facebook updates recently about iPhone contacts disappearing or weeping about losing the phone and contacts along with it.

Solution? Wirelessly sync your iPhone and iPad contacts with Gmail.

Many of us have personal Gmail accounts and some even have Google mail for business configured on our domain, where together, the majority of our contacts are stored.

And if you’re hunkering down with an iPhone 3G patiently waiting out the iPhone 5 release or just leery of iCloud, Apple’s latest Mobile-Me iteration, try the excellent wireless synching option with Gmail instead.

Here’s a summary of the sync setup process. Click here for more detail on setting up Google Sync with your iOS device.

– Open your Settings application and click on Mail, Contacts, Calendars
– Click on Add Account and select Microsoft Exchange
– Enter the email address of the account you want to synch along with your username (re-enter your Google account email address here), and password
– Tap Next and choose Cancel if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears
– When the new Server field appears, enter m.google.com and click on Next
– Select the Google Contacts to sync.

That’s it! Your Google Mail contacts and iPhone contacts will now sync automatically if you have Push enabled on your device. To sync your calendar, choose the option during the setup process.

To avoid duplicate contacts, use iCloud to sync Reminders only. And you might want to also enable the Find My iPhone feature.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years since the antiquated idea of tethering to the bloat that is iTunes to sync contacts seemed less than perfect. With wireless sync set up and enabled, you never again have to worry about losing contacts.

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