When I got my WinMo phone, I was sorely disappointed with Verizon’s “push” offerings – the Blackberry system worked out pretty nice with what little I’d played with my wife’s phone, so I was expecting great things. How do I say this politely? Verizon’s “Wireless Sync” system is patently terrible.
“Push” email worked, in the sense that it saved my battery a lot… but the minimum polling time for checking your mailbox is every 15 minutes – completely unacceptable for what I wanted. Though “Pocket Outlook Express” or whatever it is supports IMAP, it doesn’t support the “idle” feature so again you’re basically stuck checking mail every so often.
I finally found, buried away in Google’s docs, information about using ActiveSync with their systems, but then when I tried it, it didn’t work with Google Apps. So I went on my way using IMAP and just assumed that dead batteries at 9pm would be how I’d live my life for now.
Today, my phone needed a reinstall anyway because it was really starting to chug and in my attempts at getting a YouTube client installed on it I think I may have inadvertently installed malware on it. So I reset it to factory settings, and decided to give Google’s ActiveSync server another chance.
I followed the instructions to enable Sync with our Google Apps domain, and enabled Calendar while I was at it. Next, I setup a new ActiveSync/Exchange server at m.google.com, using my Apps username and password as detailed in the instructions for setting up sync on WinMo.
To my delight, it worked flawlessly. It plopped all my contacts immediately down on a fresh phone, and anything I put in Google Calendar shows up quite quickly in my appointments list.
Best of all, email shoots through at lightning speed. My phone’s now ridiculously quick again (though a purge of all the installed apps I tried and hated probably didn’t hurt that) and I’m optimistic about tomorrow’s battery life.
I was going to call up Verizon and see about getting a Droid X (they’re back-ordered anyway), but I’ve only got about another month until my “new every two” is up and that’d save me some money on it. In the mean time, I’ll let all these new Droid X owners supplement reviews and see if there’s anything I might hate about it. The last thing I want to do is be stuck with another phone I hate for two years.