Clove Technology’s Blog

Here is the filth and final part of the guide to syncing with the Google cloud.

10. Set Up Google Mail

Now having my contacts and calendar actively syncing, I wished to ensure my personal Google Mail account was connecting and syncing to my smartphone.

All I needed to do was to put in a few settings and I was away. Here is how I did it, the way Google recommends

1. Enable IMAP in your Gmail settings.
2. Open the Start menu and select Programs > Messaging > Setup Email.
3. Entered My Gmail address (including ‘@gmail.com’) in the E-mail Address field
4. Uncheck the box that asks to get settings automatically from the Internet and select Next.
5. Select Internet e-mail as your email provider in the drop-down menu.
6. Enter your name as you want it to appear in sent emails.
7. Enter a descriptive name for the email account and select Next.
8. Enter ‘imap.gmail.com’ in the Incoming Mail Server field.
9. Select IMAP4 as the Account type from the drop-down menu and select Next.
10. Enter your full email address (including ‘@gmail.com’ or ‘@your_domain.com’) and password.
11. Select Next.
12. Enter ’smtp.gmail.com’ in the Outgoing (SMTP) Mail Server field.
13. Make sure that the Outgoing server requires authentication box is checked.
14. Select the Advanced Server Settings link.
15. Make sure that the Require SSL box is checked for both incoming and outgoing emails.
16. Select The Internet as the network connection from the drop-down menu.
17. Select Done and then Next.
18. Select how often you want your phone to send/receive emails from the drop-down menu.
19. For more download options, select the Review all download settings link.
20. Select Finish.

Simple, emails begun downloading!

For Windows Live or other POP3 accounts you can easily setup a download your emails by suing the wizard. The following describes the steps (some email setups may vary and require incoming and outgoing server details.)

1. Open the Start menu and select Programs > Messaging > Setup Email.

2. Entered My email address (including ‘@watever.com’) in the E-mail Address field

3. Entered my password

4. Selected for it to get my email settings automatically, which it did

5. Entered my name

6. Entered an account display name

7. re-entered my email address and confirmed the password

8. Set up the automatic send and receive schedule timing

9. Clicked Finish and watched my emails download

11. Installed Microsoft My Phone

I mentioned earlier that Microsoft My Phone offered a very similar service. So why didn’t I use this? Well at the time of setting this up My Phone was in beta testing and thus not as stable as it is now.

My Phone does not use the exchange server connection like Google, so it is easier to set up. Just install an application on the device. (Windows Mobile 6.5 comes with this pre0installed)

All your information syncs back to Microsoft’s servers and you an access this by logging into My Phone online (web portal). Like Google you can make changes to the web based application, which are subsequently then reflected on the handset.

You can too set up a schedule for automated back up.

I have subsequently installed this as a secondary back up method.

Points to note however is that, if you sync to exchange server like Google, My Phone can not then back up your contacts. It does however back up text messages, photos and calendar.

I do believe with a little planning you too can sync this to Outlook, to have a similar to that, that I have set up with Google.

As a result of this being a secondary backup method, I let it sync automatically only once a day.

CLICK HERE FOR A FULL MICROSOFT MY PHONE GUIDE

12. Google Mobile

There is a lot more than meets the eye to Google Mobile and much of the information can be found on the following link:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/?hl=en

I have been impressed with the Google Services both for mobile and desktop. Having invested some time in getting everything the way I like it, I will be hard pushed to change, but I can honestly say I have already get back the time that I invested into setting it all up and am very happy as a result.

A few other mobile oriented web pages that Google have, that I would not be without in my favourites menu are as follows:

http://www.google.com/news

http://www.google.com/reader

http://docs.google.com