Sync problems between Nokia, Lion, iCloud and Google Calendar

This is just a list of sync problems I get when I try to sync between my iCloud-based Calendars on a Macbook (Lion) and with my Nokia E51 phone. So far, I have not really found a good solution, so for now, I'm just making notes of my observations. Problems with iCloud: Let's say I create an event called "Yoga" under my "Personal" calendar that is under iCloud in my Macbook Calendar. I can sync (push) this event to my Nokia E51 calendar. But the "Yoga" entry is marked as a "read-only" event in my Nokia calendar. That means that although I can edit the "Yoga" entry to something like "Yoga revised" in my Nokia phone, the Mac will refuse to accept the edited entry and will issue a warning saying "Changing events in a read only calendar on the phone is not allowed...". In the next sync, iCloud will then overwrite the "Yoga revised" event in my phone with the original "Yoga" event from my iCloud calendar. Essentially, it ignored the edits I made on the Nokia phone and then overwrites my phone event with the old event -- frustrating. This is a major annoyance for me because I often edit event entries in my Nokia calendar and sync these changes with my Calendar on the Macbook. If these edits keep getting ignored and overwritten by iCloud, then I'll be wasting time. My temporary solution has been to migrate all these iCloud calendars into local calendars. That is, I followed these steps: Export my iCloud calendars to a backup file (done one by one, unfortunately). Create new local calendars under the "On My Mac" category of Calendar. Import the calendars one by one. Turn off the iCloud calendars and use the new local calendars. I need to sync with Nokia and iCloud due to two factors. First, for iCloud, because this allows me to share my calendars with my wife, who's using iCloud on an iPad. Second, with my Nokia phone, because I carry this around most of the time and use it as my mobile calendar. Problems with Google Calendar (aka gCal): Another approach I've explored is to create a Google Calendar, import my Mac Calendar there and then share it back to my Mac via a weblink. This experiment resulted to almost the same results. That is, the event created in gCal is marked as a read-only event when it gets pushed to my Nokia calendar. The only difference I've noted so far is that on the next sync, gCal does not overwrite the event I edited (unlike in iCloud). If you have a free , alternative solution, please post a comment. I used Plaxo before, but I'm trying to avoid that. GCaldaemon is not really easy to use and I haven't revisited Calgoo (which used to be buggy and slow). The MacSwitched Blog - Online Journal of a Mac Switcher Tips, tricks and other discoveries about Macs and iPods.

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Sync problems between Nokia, Lion, iCloud and Google Calendar is an episode from MacSwitched by Ruben and Data Canlas.

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This episode was published on Dec 10, 2011.

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