New Phone: Finally, A Bluetooth Sync with Verizon!
First, a small rant (sorry): I’ve been a Verizon subscriber for years and a Mac user for even longer. As anyone in that situation can tell you, not being able to sync your phone with your Mac — especially when there are such killer apps on the Mac for managing your contacts and calendars — is very frustrating.
Now, I know there are all kinds of hacks out there that you can do so that you might possibly be able to get a Verizon phone to sync with OS X but most of them (that I’ve seen) include buying some beta software or seriously screwing with your phone. Why is something so simple such a pain? Verizon has chosen to disable the Bluetooth profiles that allow for such things.
To add insult to injury, their support for the Mac has always been horrendous. You might wonder why I bother when them if they’re so terrible — especially with the iPhone coming out!? Well, that’s easy — they’re the _only_ wireless service I can really depend on wherever I go.
So, back to the title of this post. I had pretty much given up on the idea of syncing. I never did get it to work with my Motorola V710 and I even asked the guy at the Verizon store if there was any phone Verizon supports that would work with the Mac and … no. There is apparently mediocre support once you get up into the PDA and whatnot but I don’t want all that. I just want a phone that makes and receives calls and syncs up with my address book and calendar.
So, frustrated, I’m now just looking for a cool-ish phone. I decided on the MOTOKRZR, or “Krazor,” because the guy at the store was an obvious phone nerd who knew his stuff and he had nothing but good things to say about it. I opted to subscribe to the VZ Navigator service (which totally kicks ass, by the way) as some consolation for not being able to sync things. I’ve been pretty happy with everything and then the other night, I thought, why not? I’ll see if it works.
I went into the Bluetooth settings on my phone, set it to be “discoverable”, opened iSync on my Mac, searched for new devices and there it was. What’s more — the checkbox for syncing my contacts with Address Book _wasn’t_ grayed out! What, what, WHAT?? So, I checked that box and the one to include e-mail addresses, and clicked “Sync Now!” It asked me if I wanted to overwrite the address book on my phone, computer, or merge them. I merged and just like that, it was done. My phone and computer were synchronized — all wirelessly via Bluetooth.
I’ve since done some tests of adding, deleting, and modifying contacts in one place and not the other and so far, everything has synced up flawlessly. Score!
Now for my calendar… The MOTOKRZR apparently doesn’t support it. Actually, I think the issue is that Verizon has unified the UI for all of their non-PDA phones (no doubt, to minimize support costs) and the calendar they use on all of their phones is pretty lousy. It definitely doesn’t use the iCalendar standard (RFC 2445). With Verizon’s calendar, things like multi-day events and recurring events are impossible or limited at best. You just can’t create an event like a haircut that happens every six weeks.
Oh well, maybe in the next version … at least the Address Book syncs! :D