Syncing iPhone with multiple computers

I finally got around to trying this, and swapping back and forth a bunch of times, and this does work, with caveats, and I did only try the one mode I was interested in, heck, it took me this long to try that! OK, so I wanted to sync my music/photos/podcasts/video from my home machine, where all that stuff is sitting on, as you might remember, a Ready NAS hooked up to the PowerMac. Just an aside, my new work laptop, a MacBook Pro feels to be about 2x faster than my dual 1.8Ghz PowerPC based deskside. My PowerMac is feeling inadequate now, but I’m not willing to plunk down $8k for a hot new Mac Pro system. This’ll just have to do, I’ll probably end up moving some video conversion to the laptop though.

Anywho. I first tried to just syncronize my calendar from my laptop, but sync my address book, etc, from my desktop. No go. You can do a sync specifically of that data from multiple machines, and have it merge it, but when I hooked the iPhone back and forth between machines, both machines turned off all the other “info” items turned off. So, for regular syncing, you have to do email, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks from the same machine. I also noticed when I turned off auto-sync on my laptop, when I next hooked it up to my desktop, auto-sync was disabled there too. I’m thinking that’s kinda OK, we’ll see if I keep it that way or turn auto-sync back on for both.

The media portion of our iPhone can come from the other machine though, and there’s no problem with having it get wiped when hooking it to the laptop. The first time I did do the sync, I got the frightening “do you want to overwrite…” message, but it only overwrote the section I’d checked. There is also, as you might have noticed, an Advanced section in the Info tab in iTunes that allows you to merge, rather than overwrite info on your iPhone.

So, this is working for me for now. That’s good, since I can update my calendar on the go to my corporate calendar with the laptop, then sync my phone. Would love for Apple to get an over the air sync for the iPhone in a future update though.

Next question, why after 2 months of billing cycles can I STILL not check out or change iPhone rate plans on the AT&T site? I’ve gotta call a representitive if I want to change my plan. I might need to bump my minutes, since I’m now only using my iPhone, and never a desk phone anymore. With all my prior phones, I’d switch to a landline if one was available. Of course, I’ve got a great deal on a legacy plan, $39.99 for 450 anytime minutes with 5k night and weekends with rollover. But, I’ve now eaten through a bunch of rollover minutes

Aug 24 2007