Addressing the Address Syncing Problem

when you are not using a mac, using the iphone has some additional complications. of course, everything has to go through itunes, the only true path to enlightenment on any operating system... syncing works with outlook and Yahoo!, and i picked yahoo because i don't want to be locked into a product just for managing my contacts.

syncing is necessary because i cannot just edit my contacts only on the iphone, it does not let me enter the characters that i need to enter for some of the names and addresses of my contacts. this means there is no way of managing contacts other than going through the syncing part of itunes, which has proven to be painful on several occasions. for Yahoo! addresses, syncing simply stopped working several weeks ago. i can still login to Yahoo! and see my addresses and enter my id and password in itunes and everything looks ok, but syncing fails every time.

iTunes could not sync with Yahoo! address book because an unknown error occurred (4). Please try again later. this very helpful message has been appearing in my itunes for the last couple of weeks and reminds me of the good old macintosh days, with the dialog box saying a system error occurred and then you could press the ok button, or not. no information, no alternatives. very helpful.

anyway, even when syncing worked, it did not really work. classical problems of doing a good job of matching different information models show up everywhere. Yahoo! handles countries as a string, the iphone handles them as a predefined list. smart syncing would try to be smart about that. iphone syncing is anything but smart. you enter a country name in Yahoo!, it shows up as a string in your address on the iphone, but you cannot edit in anymore. and the iphone country field still shows the default country. if you update that on the iphone (doing manually what the itunes programmers should have done), you end up with an address that has two inconsistent country fields, and one of these you cannot even edit or remove. multiple addresses are supported in Yahoo! and on the iphone, but not synced. nicknames are supported in Yahoo! and on the iphone, but not synced. the matching between the two contact models has been done very poorly, and apart from the obvious things that don't work, i am getting about all the not-so-obvious things that probably also don't work, but you don't recognize them and they mess up your contacts.

i have several hundreds of contacts i want to manage, and i don't want to hand-edit all of them. so i need something that works well and reliably, and itunes address syncing does not work well or reliable at all.

this means the iphone is definitely not good as your address book, unless you enjoy fixing some things by hand and being unable to fix other things at all. it would have been nice to have a good solution for managing addresses, itunes address syncing it is not. and even if it were, if you have more than just a couple of contact, the flicking interface becomes really annoying, and the lack of a search function makes managing larger number of contacts just unusable on the iphone.

one more time, if apple would be less anal about their world, people could simply build an iphone address syncing app that actually works, and i'd be more than happy to spend some money for it. but given apple's pursuit of the perfectly closed world, this probably will not happen. too bad, it would have made the iphone more usable.