Ok it is still in development phase but that did stop the thousands of people getting on board to ride the Google Wave. Now this is not the first time that Google have spat out a not quite complete package and yet again it would seem that the PR campaign which essentially this was, again has actually paid off. They had a lot of press coverage on Google Wave and a lot of buzz was generated within the industry. The question I want to pose is this:

Is Google Wave actually any good?

From what I can tell this is just a great way of getting everyone to signup for a Gmail account, those of us that do not have one of course will be unable to access Google Wave.

The idea of a real-time collaboration tool actually appeals to me however as yet I think the masses are probably not ready to have all their eggs in one big Google basket.

I am sure with development Google will once again be onto a winner with this though, whether it serves as conduit for the even more advertisement remains to be seen. Or whether it is a tool to try and get masses to sign up for Gmail and other Google services who knows?

My guess would see Google Wave change a lot over 2010 and maybe something amazing will be born, but until then it isn’t much fun and with 30 invites still needing to be sent to people who quiet frankly could not care about Google Wave, then something really special needs to happen with it.

I have an iPhone and I hate the fact you need to Sync it with iTunes which for a PC user is a painful process. Not sure if I am the only person on the planet to feel this but iTunes in Windows is just the most sluggish application I think I have ever used.

My first port of call was to use MobileMe which in the words from the Apple website:

MobileMe is a service that pushes new email, contacts, and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, Mac, and PC stay in perfect sync. No docking required. And that’s just one of many ways MobileMe simplifies your life.

Well I am not sure if it was just the way I had configured this admittedly I was using the 60 day free trial which you get from here if you wish to try it, but the syncing was slow to a point of non existence, I ended up with several versions of the same calendar none of which had updated properly with the events I had entered in. Phone contacts also did not update properly which was very annoying, people I had changed or edited simply reverted back to before I had changed them. So my first experience was not really that great and knowing that I would have to pay £59 a year for this service I started to ask around if people knew of a good alternative.

A friend of mine suggested I got a gMail account which I had already got to be honest, but he then pointed out that I should perhaps try Google Sync. So I followed the instructions on the Google Sync site, downloaded the Google Outlook 2007 plugin and off I went. Well firstly the iPhone setup works amazingly however I did have to go through a couple of teething issues. Firstly when you setup the Google Exchange account to sync your mail, calendar and contacts you have to firstly make sure that your Google Account online has all the contacts and events you need already in place. The reason being is you have to be brave and when prompted to remove Contacts and Calendar from your iPhone when you switch the Google Sync on you should do so. This allows the iPhone to then get its contacts and calendar directly from Google over a 3G or wireless network, once they have been downloaded then of course they will be stored on your phone however it is clever enough to keep checking when a network is available for any changes.

As for the file storage option you get with MobileMe, again I have a solution for that and that would be to use Dropbox. Dropbox gives you a nice 2gb of space to start with and again this is a free service, Dropbox also have an application for the iPhone which I have to say works a little more slicker than Apples own iDisk application. You can also earn more space for free by referring people to Dropbox and also if needed you can pay about $9 a month of you need 50gb of space.

If you need any help in getting this up and running feel free to shout on here. So far I am impressed with it, it works and it works well.