Palm Pre: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Sync the Pre

Your Pre is almost always with you, but the information you care about is scattered all over the place--on your Facebook page, in web-based email programs like Gmail, on your PC at work, and on your laptop at home. In an ideal world, you’d be able to tap into this scattered information anywhere, anytime. That’s the goal behind a program on your Pre called Palm Synergy, which is part of webOS (see The Pre from the Outside). Synergy keeps the information on your Pre and in your online accounts in sync with each other.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use Synergy to collect and catalogue information from your online accounts to your Pre, how to sync information on your Pre back to those accounts, and how to jerry-rig a system to keep even your desktop and laptop PCs synced with the Pre.

Synergy Close-Up

During a sync, Synergy imports and exports information to and from your Pre. On the import side of the sync, Synergy gathers, organizes, and (within limits) saves to your Pre the data in your online accounts. That way, you always have a single, consolidated set of email messages, friends’ addresses, calendar events, and so on, in your pocket.

In addition to this consolidated view, the Pre lets you view information by source, so you can, for example, change your calendar display from the consolidated view to one that shows events from your Google calendar only.

The export side of the sync is a little more complex. You can add new information to three types of account: ...