Google Sync

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been debating whether to upload my personal data contained in my address book and calender to the Googleplex. I figured Google is already a massive part of my life with search and Gmail do I really want to hand over more of my life to Google? I have no doubt Google will not profile my data or pilfer it, but in this current environment of anything is possible (countries going bankrupt, USD 50 billion ponzi schemes, Starbucks closing stores etc…) you never know.

For me, it comes down to hardware independence.  I would love to buy a cheap USD 100 phone when I travel and not have to tinker with all the settings. Currently, I use a MacBook Pro (MBP) and iPhone combo to organize and manage my life, the two make sweet music like Hall and Oates.  My iPhone data is backed up to my MBP and my MBP is backed up to an external 250GB Toshiba drive.  My dilemma is I’m locked into an iPhone only solution at the moment and living in India means if something happens to my iPhone I have to shell out USD 640 for a new iPhone…that is a HUGH deal breaker for me.

There are two solutions to this:

1. Apple expands it’s iSync software to natively work with many of the new phones from BlackBerry, Nokia and Google’s Android platform. Most likely won’t happen as Apple historically is a closed platform. I’m a hugh iPhone fan, but the power of open source technology is no match for a closed architecture platform.

2. Move my data to Google which would be my central data repository.  Then using the various Google tools such as Google Sync I could download my data to a new phone and sync on the fly. And as more companies offer Android based phones I would have a much larger selection of phones to choose from. For example, Motorola just scraped their own phone OS and decided to exclusively use the Android platform.

I hope the competition between Apple’s iSync and Google’s Sync make both products better in the near future. Ideally, I’d like to stick with Apple’s iSync and not have my address book and calendar reside in the cloud but I’m guessing it’s just a matter of time.