Calendar

Okay, so I’m about 5 days into my experiment with Android on the Nexus One. Mostly I agree with what MG writes; I’ll put some other thoughts down later.

But the thing that I’m struggling with the most is calendar. The built-in calendar is really mostly built for Google Calendar, although I think it can subscribe (but not edit or publish) to .ics files. So that’s great if you’re using Google Calendar, not so much if you’re using anything else.

Here at Mozilla, we run Zimbra for mail, calendar, messaging, etc. With my iPhone, I just set up the CalDAV account, and it works great.

With my Android phone, so far best solution is to use the 3rd party app TouchDown, but I don’t love it — for all the reasons you’d imagine not loving a 3rd party Exchange client. 🙂

So I’m willing to jump through a couple of hoops here — syncing Zimbra with GCal maybe? — but am a little stumped on what the best thing to do is. My calendar essentially runs my life — without it, it’s going to be hard to live with the Android.

4 comments

  1. John,

    I set up the linked php script on my local server so I could share Zimbra events out to my GCal without sharing them to the world.

    Without something like this intermediate proxy or a third party app, there just isn’t a lot of options because of lack of extensive CalDav support in GMail.

  2. Have you spent much time using the standard Calendar app? If so, would you agree with my conclusion that it sucks? Palm got this right ten years ago. The Treo’s calendar (my previous phone was a Treo 650) was much, much better than the current Android one. And, irritatingly, it was one of the earliest apps written, so uses undocumented platform APIs, so it can’t be compiled in the Android Open Source Project, so I _can’t_hack_on_it_ and make it better. Grr.

    Gerv
    (with a Android Dev Phone)

    • I haven’t really used the built-in calendar much at all. Assume it acts a lot like GCal on the web, which has some innovations. Calendars overall aren’t great; the iPhone’s has gotten pretty usable, iCal on OS X, too.