iCloud & Windows Phone 7

[iMaddin]

Hi!

Two days ago my iPhone 4S was snatched out of my hand by three men on bikes and now I have to survive with my Lumia 800 for about half a year.

All my contacts & calendars are stored on iCloud and I wonder if anyone has any experience with syncing iCloud contacts & calendars to a Windows Phone 7 device?

I know that Windows Phone can sync calendar & contacts from my Google account but I will not move all my calendars & contacts to Google. Is there a way to at least keep Google & iCloud calendars & contacts in sync?

What I found out so far is that the Mac application (I'm on a Mac) BusyCal can publish iCloud calendars to Google Calendar. Though I think BusyCal has to be running in order for it to sync. I wish Windows Phone would support CalDAV but oh well. (Another problem is that my Google calendars aren't showing up on my Lumia 800 for some reason but that's another problem.)

However I haven't found a way to do anything with contacts. I hope someone can help me with this.

Thanks!

 

[joeaux]

If you have an iOS device other than your iPhone you can do it. Just set up an Exchange account on that device with Google. It'll sync your contacts, calendar and email. You just have to be careful not to allow them to cross sync. Can get ugly. Secret is when you set this up make sure iCloud Backup is turned off! If you don't and it backs up your newly synced Google stuff to iCloud you start getting double contacts and the like. Once you do this all your stuff will be synced to your Google account and you can then just set up Google on your Lumia. Works great. You can also do all this with the Mac using Mail. There are several good tutorials on the web. I've done this. It's not hard but it's not trivial either. Just read and understand what you're doing before you start. Oh and sorry about your 4S getting snatched. That's a really good phone.
-joe-

 

[iMaddin]

Thanks for you reply. I was just about to tell you that this shouldn't work because Google stuff will just be kept separate from my iCloud stuff. But I am wrong! Thanks! For some reason my contacts from iCloud are synced over to my Google account when I set Google Contacts sync on my iPad. I thought that nothing would happen because in the Contacts app you can see the contacts for the different accounts (i.e iCloud and Google).

It doesn't seem to work with Calendars though. Or does it for you? Do iCloud calendars sync with Google calendars for you?

Yeah I am really upset about my iPhone. Stupid thieves. How come people like that exist...

 

[joeaux]

Yeah, calendars are a bit different. Sorry for not going into better detail. You need to export your calendar from iCal to Google Calendar. Here's the Google page for the tutorials:

Export Import

It's pretty easy and worked fine back when I did it.
-joe-

 

[iMaddin]

Okay thanks but like I said, I don't want to move all my stuff from iCloud to Google Calendar. Before iCloud I had everything on Google Calendar but moved everything to iCloud. Now I want my stuff to stay on iCloud and sync it to Google Calendar if possible since I will only stay with my Lumia 800 until I get a new iPhone.

I wonder if anyone else knows if that's possible. If there's no other solution then I will have to use BusyCal which can publish my iCloud calendars to Google Calendar but the software is a bit too pricey just to do that for me.

In Google Calendar one can actually subscribe to iCloud calendars but there is a bug with Google Calendar that prevents it from working.

Any help would be appreciated. Such a pain when someone steals an iPhone and then having to abandon all the great iPhone apps for months...