After the iPhone 3G release two weeks ago the web has been flooded with articles praising this eighth wonder of the world. I’ve been using the first gen iPhone since December, and have been really happy with it. I guess my biggest issue with the phone has been the crappy camera (which sadly isn’t improved in the second gen iPhone). Since I’m running a jailbreaked phone I haven’t been able to update to 2.0, until now.

On Sunday the code wizards in the “iPhone dev-team” released the much awaited Pwnage 2.0 tool. Currently it’s only available on the Mac, but there are tutorial describing how to use a prebuilt IPSW file and jailbreak your iPhone 2.0 from a PC. I used my girlfriends Mac to upgrade to 2.0, unlock and jailbreak my phone. The only issue I had was a popup in the Pwnage tool asking if “I’m a legit iPhone user”… Well, I didn’t steal the phone, so I guess yes..? Well, turns out this question determines if your phone gets unlocked and jailbreaked, or just jailbreaked. Had to run the tool twice, and answer NO to this question to get it to work.

One of the things I’ve been missing the most after changing job and mobile last year is the Exchange support in Windows Mobile. Thankfully this is one of the big things on the iPhone 2.0. One of the things I did some time back was to consolidate all my e-mail accounts through Google Apps for your domain, and Google have been hosting the mail for follesoe.no for over a year now. With added IMAP support Gmail works great from any client application, as well as on the iPhone. I haven’t had a good way to manage contacts and calendars, but I want to use Google Apps as the master, and then sync it with both my iPhone and my PC. Unfortunately Google does not support the Exchange ActiveSync protocol natively, but there are third party services that will gateway your Google Calendar and Contacts and provide Exchange access to it. One of those services is the easy to use, free service from NuevaSync. I came across this service in a blog post titled “Using Google as a *free* Mobile Me Alternative with NuevaSync”.

After configuring NuevaSync I needed to find a way to get my contacts from Outlook 2007 and into Gmail Contact. The optimal solution would be to connect directly from Outlook 2007 to NuevaSync. I was a little bit surprised to learn that you can’t force Outlook 2007 to use the Exchange ActiveSync protocol used by mobile devices. Since NuevaSync doesn’t support the full RPC protocol used by Exchange this wasn’t an option. So my second alternative is to find a way to sync my local computer with Google Calendar and Google Contacts.

People have had mixed experiences with Google Contacts. Gmail can clutter your address book by automatically adding people you communicate with. This is now an optional feature, and you can disable automatic adding of contacts. After disabling this feature and deleting all existing online contacts I was ready to do the syncing. Problem is that I couldn’t find any good tools to do this. There is a free tool from Google that will sync your calendar, but it doesn’t support contacts. OggSync is another alternative. But the free/trail version doesn’t support contacts either, and I’m not paying until I’m sure it works nicely.

The solution to my problem turned out to be open source software. I’ve been a big fan of Firefox for a long time, and figured this might be a good time to check out Thunderbird. Setting up Thunderbird with Google IMAP is a breeze, and well documented by Google. Thunderbird also supports contact imports from Outlook 2007, so I didn’t have any problems getting my contacts into Thunderbird. To synchronize contacts between Google Contacts and Thunderbird I used the Zindus add-on. Thunderbird doesn’t come with a calendar out of the box, but with the official Mozilla Lightning extension you get both calendar and tasks support in Thunderbird. I also had to install a “Provider for Google Calendar” add-on to get Lightning to sync with Google Calendar. My current setup now looks something like this:

I have to agree that it might look a little bit messy, but it works. And it’s free! It’s just something really pleasing of being able to add a appointment on the iPhone, and seconds later see it show up both in my online Google Calendar, and in Thunderbird. Or to edit a contact in Thunderbird, and moments later have it updated both in Gmail and on my phone. I’m quite happy with the current setup. And the important part is that the “master store” is kept on my Google Apps for your domain account.

And for the other new stuff in 2.0: the app store is just AMAZING! So many great apps, really nicely integrated both on the phone and in iTunes. So far my absolute favorite app is the iTunes remote control application. I’ve used Pocket PC based remote control software, but this one is just awesome! Now the only thing missing is an equally good Vista Media Center remote control, and the iPhone just became the coolest media remote ever.

If you haven't upgraded yet, go do it!