I have been scratching around for some time looking for a good place to store my contacts and calendar events in one central place but of course on a personal budget of nothing, nadda and zero.

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.