Switching to Windows Phone - Calendar, Contacts, Mail

[WPCentral Question]

Hey everyone! new here.

I'm up for a new phone and a new computer, and I was thinking of getting the Lumia Icon (currently have ancient iPhone 4) and Surface Pro 3. I want a decent camera on the phone and I like the idea of sensitive stylus input on a computer, so I hope these are decent choices

I've read a few intros to the WP UI (including from here), but somethings weren't so clear. Sorry if everyone always asks the same questions!

I have 2 gmail addresses (1 personal and 1 work-related), and I was wondering how well the phone and surface worked with google services. How does it work to sync email, calendar events, and contacts between the phone and Google? Basically I want to know if (1) gmail folder/labels will show up in the app, (2) will "read"/archived, etc. messages on the phone be marked as such in the "browser" version of gmail, (3) will added contacts to the phone people or whatever app be added to the browser version of gmail, (4) same with calendar - do events added show up in google calendar?

I think these have to do a bit with CardDav and CalDav, but I'm not very sure about the technical side of things. And I also don't know if there are changes on this front between WP 8 and 8.1.

Thanks for reading!

 

[hotphil]

I faced a similar transition recently. Biggest problem was with Outlook.com Calendar and its "subscription" to a Google Calendar. It doesn't work. There's dozens of posts in MS forums about it.
You may also have issues with mis-matched fields in Contacts.
Here's what I ended up doing:

Export all Contacts to csv.
Meticulously tidy the csv.
Test import 10 or so Contacts to Outlook.com.
Do a live Contacts import.

Much the same for Calendar.
Export Calendar from Google.
Import it to Outlook.com.
Don't try and link the two.

I set Google to forward all mail to Outlook.com
Then over the course of a couple of weeks as mails came in, amend the address of whichever service was sending me the mail.

Ideally, you'd get all these nice online services to "sync" with each other with little effort. I've not seen it work like that. I had to go for as much of a clean break as possible. And it's been worth it - I've got a simple setup with no concerns about Calendar being out of date or Contact fields mismatching etc.

Oh, and the single biggest thing when doing anything like this - have a backup of a backup of an export of all the data you value/have trusted to an online service. Weird things can happen when you start creating/breaking synchronisations and have multiple devices doing so.