A month or so ago I wrote about my new toy, and I’m still thrilled with the Blackberry Bold.  Working in an office full of iPhone enthusiasts I’m flying solo from a support basis, but last week – in conjunction with an effort to finally rid myself of Microsoft Outlook – I spent some time setting up Google Mobile Sync.

Or more correctly, I just downloaded the software from m.google.com/sync.  And ran it.  And waited. And waited….

The Google Apps effort had been a work-in-progress for some time.  Last September we piloted a move of our company e-mail to Google Apps which made sense – most of the team were Gmail users anyway, and it ultimately came down to just a few of us who were using Outlook. More relevantly, we had an old Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based server in a US hosting facility from which we’d migrated nearly every other service except for our own mail.  So, with a free Google Apps mail server – why run an extra machine?

Anyway, about 30 minutes after the download, the Bold screen was showing that it had synced several thousand contact records and six weeks of calendar entries into the phone.  And, with some doubling-up of calendar entries (as far as I can tell it deals with meeting invitations and calendar entries differently) it seems to be working well.

I’ve persisted despite the occasional doubling up of calendar items because this initiative has had the additional benefit that I don’t really need the Blackberry Desktop Manager application anymore.  More specifically, it appears that the USB drivers are really quite dodgy under Windows Vista (which is the devil’s work, but that’s another post) and I’ve only successfully synced the device via USB after a hard reboot of my laptop.  Which, as Vista users well know, takes about 15 minutes.  So as the only purpose for the BDM was to sync with my pst file – they are both now history.

Google Mobile Sync only does Contacts and Calendar events; mail works amazingly efficiently between the BIS and Google Apps (the latency between the two platforms is amazingly low), but Notes and Tasks are now a Blackberry-only zone for me.  So while not a perfect success, I’ve now got mail, calendar and contacts working syncing over the air, without the Blackberry Enterprise Server.