In part 1, I described what I was hoping to accomplish with my new smart phone. In this installment I’ll describe what I had to do to get my tasks synchronized to my phone.
The well-established way to synchronize contacts on a Windows Mobile device seems to be to use Activesync to synchronize tasks with Microsoft Outlook, but as I said earlier, I don’t own the proper version of Outlook and don’t intend to buy it. Besides, that’s not where I already keep my tasks…
I’m a huge fan of Remember the Milk, which is a great online task management application. It displays well on my iGoogle page, which is important to me. Thankfully, the fine folks at RTM gave me exactly what I was looking for in MilkSync.
MilkSync is an application that runs on your smartphone and synchronizes between the Windows Mobile tasks application and the Remember the Milk website. It works over-the-air or when in the cradle. Like I said, it’s perfect for what I was trying to accomplish, since it doesn’t require anything installed to the PC. Also, they were kind enough provide the ability to tell the application to sync whenever the mobile device is connected to the PC, so I don’t have to do any goofy tricks like scheduling regular syncs. Finally, they let you synchronize 2-ways or just one way or the other. Right now I’m only syncing devices from the web application to the phone, in case something goes wrong.
The only downside I’ve found – you have to be a premium member of the RememberTheMilk service in order to use that application, and that means a yearly fee. No big deal though. RememberTheMilk is awesome, and they deserve to be compensated for the value they provide to me.
Visit part 3 for my attempts at syncing my Google Calendar to my new phone.