Open Source Blackberry Sync

I got my Blackberry Pearl to get work email. I do like it, even now that I’m unemployed (yes, the iPhone is much cooler, but I’m stuck with Verizon for the near future).

But if you aren’t on a Blackberry Enterprise server, the only thing that syncs wirelessly is email. What about contacts and calendars?

I had a trial version of Outlook on my home laptop. But you could only sync calendar and contacts via USB so that was pretty worthless except as a backup mechanism. And being unemployed I really didn’t see the reason to pay for Outlook.

I’ve used Thunderbird before and as a GMail client it is fine. I debated just using Chrome as an application window straight to GMail, but I do like to be able to use email and calendars offline occasionally. Thunderbird has a decent calendar add-on called Lightning and it has an address book.

But how to sync contacts and calendars? Hmm. It turns out you can use Google Calendar and contacts as a bridge. Lightning can act as a Google Calendar client. So those are always in sync. And there’s another add-in called Zindus which syncs Thunderbird contacts and Google contacts. Cool. So Thunderbird and Google are now totally in sync.

What about the Blackberry? Well Google makes a product called Google Sync which syncs Google calendar and contacts with the Blackberry. Golden! Desktop, Google and Blackberry all in sync for free.

There’s one tiny hiccup. For some reason Google sync actually syncs contacts, but only downloads calendar items to your Blackberry. So if I enter a calendar item on my Blackberry, it doesn’t sync anywhere else. Note to self, don’t do that.

Otherwise this is pretty cool. I can enter a contact in any of the three locations and it will find it’s way to the other two. I can enter calendar items from the desktop or Google and it will get to the others. And I can send and receive email from all three.

Next up, Open Office and Google Documents…