Google adds mobile access to Calendar, but Toffa's GooSync is better

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 27 May 2007 17:01

Your IT - Home IT

Google Calendar users can now access their calendar from their mobiles, Google has announced, but a third party product that does this better has been around since the beginning of this year.

Google 'announced' the new feature in a posting  on its official blog site from Devesh Parekh, Software Engineer, Google Calendar team, who said: "We realise that more people in the world have mobile phones than have computers, and people take their cell phones with them everywhere. Since one of our main goals on the Calendar team is to make planning your events and maintaining your schedule as easy as possible, starting today, you can access your Google Calendar account from your cell phone!  Just visit calendar.google.com from your phone, and you'll see your agenda of upcoming events, complete with details like date, time, location, description, and guest list."

This suggests that users cannot update the calendar from their mobiles, but as iTWire reported in January,   there is a third party product that allows access to Google Calendars from mobiles, and supports two way synchronisation: GooSync from UK based Toffa International Limited, a developer of mobile synchronisation products.

The company claimed that any user with a Google calendar account could use GooSync to wirelessly synchronise their appointments and events to their mobile device. Toffa's service is also free, but offers only a limited range of options, For full synchronisation capability users must pay for an advanced account. GooSync has been running as a worldwide open beta with more than 15,000 users since October 2006.

The service is based on Toffa's commercial synchronisation engine, SyncWiseLive, which supports industry open standards (SyncML). Therefore, according to Toffa, GooSync is compliant with all of the latest mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). A list of compatible devices is available.