Bad Scene

Up until today, I have been hobbled by depending on Google Calendar while being a Treo 650 user (and not, say, owning a Blackberry). Syncing Google Calendar is not native, and the applications out there seem to me to be either pricey, insecure, or incompatible. Or so I thought.

After some setbacks, I finally managed to get gcalsync to work! Here’s what I did:

1. Install the J9 Exchanger along with the JSR75 extensions.
• JVM/JavaVMCheck_enUS.prc
• JVM/J9JavaVMMidp20.prc
• JSR75/fileconnect.prc
• JSR75/pimop.prc
• JSR75/PIMPrefs.prc
2. Soft-reset your Treo.
3. Download the gcalsync.jar file straight to your Treo.
4. Open the IBM J9 Exchanger program and launch the gcalsync midlet.
5. Set your time zone offset: USA/Pacific time, for example, requires -08:00 for both upload and download.

That’s it! This worked for me. The only problems I’ve seen so far:

• All-day events don’t seem to obey the time zone offset.
• Recurring events aren’t handled.

I welcome any comments or further tips you might have.