Have You Found the Perfect Sync?

DigitalWizard asks: "For me, the perfect sync is a platform independent sync. I have been looking for a website for sometime now; one that will support both SyncML for my mobile devices, and iCalendar for my laptop, with which I can keep events, tasks and contacts up to date on all. If I can use SyncML, I can synchronize just about any handheld device, PDA and phone alike. If the same server would also support iCalendar access, then I can use applications such as Mozilla Calendar, or even Rainlendar to access and edit my data from the laptop. This would be my perfect setup because then I am not stuck to using Palm Desktop or Outlook for my handhelds, and I'm free to try out different OS's on my system without losing all my PIM functionality. Plus, if it's web-based I can access it when I'm away from home. I have searched the web, and found quite a few candidates, but nothing quite fits the bill. I would really like to hear if anyone else has found a website which will do all of this. (Correction: I found one, but upon using it, the synchronization does not work very well.) I may publish my own list of finds in the future if feedback to this one is slow, but I'm interested in unbiased feedback for now. Web + SyncML + iCalendar — Is it out there?"

A very tough problem...

[spiritraveller]

I have been through this exact same problem. I gave up and am now using a combination of Gmail (with GTDGmail extension) and my Nokia 9300's calendar application.

The 9300 has a really good full qwerty keyboard and a 640 pixels wide screen, so for the most part, I just stick with it and don't sync.

For tasks, I just use Gmail. The GTDGmail extension makes it pretty easy to use the "Getting Things Done" system with Gmail. And since the phone can access the web, I just use gmail's plain html interface over the phone. It is actually faster than using the phone's built-in email client.

I do backup the phone's data to my Windows machine frequently, and I sync the contacts with Outlook so that they can be exported to Gmail. But that's the only thing I use Outlook for. You could probably accomplish the same thing with SyncML using Mobical.net or a similar service.