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I wanted to introduce my iPhone to the cloud. My old Nokia used to cable sync to Outlook at work and I enjoyed having my Calendar on my phone for making appointments while out and about. I Just had to remember to sync my calendar to Outlook upon my return to the office. Or more importantly, remember to take the cable to work with me to do this task.

I took a look at Apples offering to Cloud Computing called MobileMe. This is software which runs in your system tray and will sync your outlook, contacts and mail through push to your mobile phone. It works almost seamlessly. But there are two downsides to MobileMe. The first is cost. Its NZD$149 per annum and it doesn’t work if your calendar is hosted on an exchange server, like mine.

The plus side of MobileMe will be the awesome little features. ‘Find my Phone’ which will locate your phone on the internet should it go missing. This will work only once iPhone OS3 has been released on the 17th June. You can look at its approximate location on a map, get it to play a sound to help find it and display a message on the screen to enable its return to you via a human.

The other awesome feature of MobileMe is remote wipe. Should the above scenario turn out a little more sinister than a misplaced phone (i.e. its been nicked…) you can reset the iPhone to factory settings so that the wrong people don’t get your personal info. When you do get your phone, or get a new one, you can restore your backed up data from MobileMe.

So MobileMe is more like a data insurance policy for your iPhone. It also works with Laptops and Desktops as well, so all your information is centrally stored in the cloud. Handy. You also get 10gb or so of storage space to share/upload photos and documents as well, known as iDisk.

Before I committed myself to paying annually for a service, I decided to look around for a free one, and the first one I found was Google.

Google have an awesome way to access your calendar, contacts and email using an exchange server and can even be pushed to your phone by way of the exchange.

Using the Google Calendar Sync, I was able to set up two way synchronisation between my Google Calendar and my Outlook calendar without the company exchange server getting in the way as it did with MobileMe. I was also able to edit my contacts online in my Gmail account and have emails sent to my Gmail account pushed/fetched to my iPhone. The downside to Google Calendar Sync is that my work computer needs to be on and logged in/locked in order for this to work. No biggie.

Sending photos to somewhere that they can be seen isn’t a deal breaker either. I have a wonderful app called Mobile Fotos from the app store. Mobile Photos works with Flickr. It cost me $4, but well worth it. But again, as I centralise myself to one cloud, I might move my images etc across to Picasa. The jury is still out on that one at the moment though.

At present I’m running with everything on Google and I have no complaints. I might have a few once I see my data usage for fetching data from Google, but on a 3G network, this is rather fast. I rarely leave the city, so an ideal solution for me.

N.B. I have found out that you have to set your email account up seperately to the exchange account and turn off email sync. Otherwise you get errors and it wont let you check your email. The instructions for sync’ing your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar with your iphone can be found here.