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Not being allowed to have a mobile phone with camera at work (because of security reasons), I’m forced to have a secondary phone, next to my iPhone. While this is already troublesome enough, as I can have only one phone registered in the network at a time, emails as well as my calendar and contacts aren’t sorted at all, which makes changes to them quite annoying – until now.

I finally managed to register at the OVI-store and get my old but still well working Nokia E61 to syncronize my contacts and my calendar. Also, push-email is finally working the way I like it. So how did I get it to work?:

1) I’m using Nuevasync, which works very well since I got it, That’s also the reason why I got a premium account. There’s a free trial though, to test the service.

2) Get an OVI account and download the newest version of Mail for Exchange of MfE.

3) Simply follow these steps and there you go, a synced calendar and contacts on all your phones as well as push-email.

When I got my phone a few weeks ago, I directly connected it to my computer and everything seemed to work well. (Keep in mind I sync my Iphone using Itunes and Windows XP on VMware with Ubuntu as host.) After a while it showed me the alert message 1611 though and since I was wondering what was going on, I went online to read that I bricked my Iphone. You can imagine the sudden burst of cold sweat on my skin, thinking my brand new gadget is broken. Luckily, I never really believe the first thing I read online – especially not if it’s bad news – and went on to read more. I finally discovered that it’s nothing else than some minor flaw that is quite easy to solve. I came across the same error today again, after I tried to sync my phone with a different ‘computer’. Before I’ll tell you what happened, here may be the solution for you to get around these alert messages. If you’re using virtualization tools, please read on.

As I mentioned earlier, I use virtualization software to run software that isn’t native to Linux distributions, such as Itunes. VMware always served me well, but since VirtualBox has USB 2.0 as well and offers a great seamless mode, I tried the new version and found it snappier. Reason enough for me to try to move my data I have saved to my new playground. I read online that just copying the Itunes folder would do this for me, but when I just tried to sync a new album quickly before sport, I realized that Itunes was deleting applications from my phone. Apparently I clicked something like do not sync programs, thinking it would just sync my music instead and I’m good to go. This, it turned out, wasn’t the case. I wasn’t too worried about the whole thing though, as I knew I just made a backup of my Itunes folder.

When I tried to restore my phone earlier today, I came across the mentioned alert messages again and neither of the hints Apple provides helped me. It seems that the virtualization tools have problems with the restoring process, as I remember that I solved the issue by rebooting my computer, starting Windows and using Itunes there, when I first got my phone. So I started Windows and was told that my phone software doesn’t function properly and Itunes needs to download the update for it again. Fair enough, but when it synced my stuff afterwards, I found all my settings gone. I can’t really be bothered to sort everything now but will have to do so soon. Another point I’m really happy about: I sync twitter, feeds, mail, contacts and calendars, which means nothing important was erased.

While this was partly my fault – no doubt – I will try not to make such a mistake again, as  it tends to be quite time consuming to restore my ‘original’ settings. If it should happen again though, I’ll post it here and hope to make your lifes easier by sharing my experiences.

The way I use my phone has changed dramatically with my new Iphone. While I was accustomed to the use of mobile internet and email, the way I use these now has changed completely. I want to have mails instantly and not wait anymore. Furthermore, I feel the need to have everything in sync, that includes – next to mail – my contacts, my calendar and even twitter and my feeds. The last two are easily achieved using TweetDeck and Newsstand. TweetDeck is syncing twitter updates as I’m using it both on my phone and desktop computer while Newsstand is syncing my feeds with Google.

Syncing emails, my calendars and contacts is not accomplished that easily. The first step for an Iphone newbie like me was to check out MobileMe. Though the experiences seem to vary greatly, I decided to give it a try using the free trial. I wasn’t really overwhelmed I have to say, but I didn’t really know what to expect either. Especially the price tag is too high, if you ask me. I did like the idea of finding my phone in case it was stolen and the option to delete it remotely, but I never lost a phone and sure will try not to change that and enabling the passcode lock will delete the phone after ten wrong attempts anyway. I still tried to locate my phone I and ended up finding a three block big circle around my actual position. This isn’t really helpful if you don’t happen to live in a remote area.

So I went on to find another option to suit my needs and I came across Nuevasync. It offers syncing my Gmail calendar and contacts for free. I also tried the push email option that is free for three days and was more than happy with it. Besides, 25$ yearly aren’t really asked to much, i’d say. Before I start to explain how it’s set up, I would like to stress that all your calendar entries and contacts on your phone will be erased and exchanged with the information you have saved in Gmail. I only set up the calendar but found my phone without contacts shortly afterwards. This may not be an issue caused by Nuevasync, but I’d like to inform you about my experiences in order to save you time and annoyance. This is how it works:

0) Nuevasync requires a Gmail account. Please create one, if you don’t have one already.

1) Visit nuevasync.com and register.

2) Login to your newly created account.

3) Click on the change button on the service you would like to use, to set it up and follow the instructions.

4) To set it up on your phone, I would kindly ask you to read the Need help configuring your phone? -section, as everything is explained in detail there.