Google Calendar Gets Mobile

If there was an award for "Best Google Service That Not That Many People Think About When They Think About Google," it might well go to Google Calendar. It's just plain well done, with a slick and simple interface and plenty of features. You could manage a demanding schedule out of it--and while Lotus Notes remains the official calendaring solution here at PCW, we in the editorial department like Google Calendar so much that we use it to track a growing percentage of our work together.

Yesterday, Google rolled out yet another reason to give its calendar a try--a version that squishes it down into a phone-friendly format. This is a complement to full-blown Google Calendar rather than a complete calendar app: Basically, you can see your schedule, move backwards and forwards one day at a time, and use a quick-scheduling feature to enter appointments in plain English ("staff meeting tomorrow at 3pm"). And that's kind of the point--it's not overloaded with clutter, and pops up quickly, so you can see what's on your plate at a glance.

It's cool enough, in fact, that I could see folks abandoning the idea of trying to sync their phone calendar applications with whatever they use to manage their schedule on the PC, and simply keeping everything in Google. There'd be significant downsides to this strategy--it takes a bit longer to get into Google Calendar than to pull up a calendar that's stored in your phone, and you wouldn't be able to check your schedule if you were someplace that Internet access doesn't reach (like, say, on a phone).

But even the best synching solutions I've ever used have been less than perfectly perfect. (I'm sure I'm not the only person who's managed both to blow away my entire calendar and end up with every item on it in duplicate form at different times.) So there's lots to say in favor of the notion of keeping one copy of your calendar on the Net. And I wouldn't be stunned to see Google (whose Google Maps and Gmail applications for phones are pretty darn slick) come out with a phone-based Google Calendar applet that provides some level of access to your schedule when you're disconnected,

Like I say, this initial phone version of Calendar is pretty Spartan--you can't even change or delete existing appointments. For now, though, there's only one feature I really want on my phone that it doesn't seem to have: I don't see any way to quickly jump to any date. Checking an appointment two months in the future would apparently involve dozens of clicks--you'd have to get there one day at a time.

(Incidentally, I'm typing this at my car dealer's service department--which, since it has comfy sofas and I've found an open Wi-Fi network, is a surprisingly pleasant place to blog from.)

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