Edit Word Documents on your iPhone with "Documents To Go"

Recently I heard about a $5 iPhone app called Documents To Go which allows editing of Microsoft Word documents. If you're not familiar with the iPhone, it has built-in viewers for e-mail attachments in several common desktop file formats, including Word, PDF and Excel, but does not have an editing capability. Documents To Go adds that capability, at least for MS Word files today and for Excel in a future update.
The way I heard about this app first was when several users complained (all on the same day, curiously) that it did not work with our service! At first I couldn't understand what a Word document editing app had to do with our service, but once you realize that there's no easy way to get the files onto and off of the device, it becomes more obvious. Add to that the fact that Documents To Go comes from renowned device sync client developer DataViz, and the penny drops...
Documents To Go can communicate with an application you install on your desktop computer, to fetch and save files, but if you spring $5 extra for the Exchange version, it can read and send files through a corporate mail server, or of course our push e-mail service (we fixed the compatibility problem soon after the first reports). It has its own sync client software, and shows up as a separate device as far as our service is concerned. It has its own settings page where you enter your username, password and www.nuevasync.com, much the same as for the phone's built in client:



Then sync your inbox (my GMail account in this example), which will display all the messages with compatible attachments:



Word attachments can be opened and edited like this:



Then saved on the device, back to your desktop, or e-mailed directly from the app which is what I did with this document, and here it is open in Word on my PC:

Push E-Mail is Here!

Big news: We've launched our new 'push' E-Mail Sync Service. The iPhone, Palm Pre, Nokia S60 Series and Windows Mobile Phones can use push E-Mail Sync.
Your mailbox is accessed by our service via the industry standard IMAP protocol which is widely supported by corporate servers and also by most hosted e-mail services,
including Google's GMail.



New messages appear on your device within seconds with an optional beep or vibrate alert. iPhone users don't need to keep the mail application open:




Push E-Mail sync is part of our $25/yr Premium Service. In addition to e-mail sync, premium users get priority support and the ability to sync an unlimited number of calendars, with no restriction on history. Premium service is run on separate machines from the free service for optimal performance and reliability. Once an account is upgraded to premium status, e-mail can be configured by clicking 'change' next to 'E-Mail' on the web site:



There is a streamlined configuration process for GMail users. If the account has an @gmail.com or @googlemail.com address this screen is presented and you only need to enter your password to finish:



For other users there is a comprehensive setup screen that allows all the mail server settings to be entered individually:



There's more information on our web site and if you'd like to comment or ask a question please check out the new E-Mail and Premium Service areas on the Nuevasync forum.

I have to thank all the users who helped us test e-mail sync over the past few weeks. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has supported us with unsolicited donations. Those donors will all receive complementary premium service.

Contact Counts on the Web Site

The detailed account status page has been enhanced to show more information about your Google contacts. We've found this to be handy when investigating reports from users who had either no contacts on their device, or the wrong number of contacts. Often there was confusion about which contacts, and how many should be syncing. The new information displayed on the web site should clear up the confusion:

The example above shows a user with 241 contacts in the 'My Contacts' pseudo-group at Google. This is the set of contacts that we sync. If a contact shows up under 'My Contacts', it should sync. If it doesn't, then it definitely won't sync. The default 'System' groups (Friends, Family etc) and two user-created groups (Test Group, Second Group) are displayed next. Contacts in these groups are always included in 'My Contacts' and so they will sync. The last group is the one formerly known as 'Suggested Contacts', and now labeled 'Most Contacted' at Google. By popular demand, we do not sync contacts in this group. So for this user, the total number of contacts that will sync is 241. Contacts in all of the groups except 'Most Contacted', will sync but they don't count towards the total because those contacts already accounted for under 'My Contacts'.

You can see the detailed account status page either by clicking the link in the troubleshooting page, or by clicking on the green/orange/red 'lights' in the main status page. If you're wondering why it takes a while to load, it's because we re-fetch your contact information from Google in real-time, to be sure the page shows up-to-date results.

Service Outage Sunday

Unfortunately we had a service problem today that didn't trigger our service quality monitoring system, but did affect service. Please accept my apologies for this. We're working to improve the monitoring system to catch the particular type of error it missed. Service has been brought back to normal operating state.

Service Overloaded by iPhone 3.0 Update

Apple's highly anticipated 3.0 firmware release is causing us some operations problems right now. Large numbers of devices have been updated within a short time period, and it appears that after the update the sync code in the phone triggers a 'resync'. This puts extra load on our service which is currently running at maximum capacity. We've enabled load throttling measures which should ensure it remains working, but unfortunately not all devices will be able to sync until the load spike passes.
UPDATE: We've deployed some hardware upgrades tonight and service is now back up and running normally. We're expecting to be able to handle the load peak forecast for Thursday morning as the remaining iPhone users update their devices.

Sony Ericsson P1i

We've had owners of Sony Ericsson phones connecting to the service for a while but they proved to be a stealthy group of users in that nobody had ever reported any problems to us. (I'm talking about the 'home grown' Sony Ericsson phones, not the line of Windows Mobile devices they make). Curiosity got the better of me and I went eBay fishing for a test device. After a few delays with shipping and then me being out the office, my 'unlocked' P1i finally arrived today. The P1i is no longer sold, but there are similar current devices such as the G502. Anyway, the P1i is now configured and syncing. Interestingly, although the Sony Ericsson phones run the same Symbian S60 OS as Nokia devices, they ship a completely different sync client, Roadsync from DataViz (incidentally, you can get this client for Nokia devices too if you want).



My phone already had the Exchange sync client installed but Sony Ericsson's support page implies that some devices might not come with it pre-installed. Configuration was easy and I'm happy to report that it synced just fine. That is, except for the fact that contact pictures did not show up on the device. We need to so some investigation to determine why that's happening.
I connected the phone with WiFi, rather than cell data service. It does push sync over WiFi, even when the device is 'turned off'. A nice surprise because not all devices do this (the iPhone does not for example).
The keyboard drove me completely nuts. There are three or four characters per key, and both a shift and alt keys. I was unable to deduce the relationship between them by experiment and had to resort to the on-screen keyboard. The side scroll-click-wheel worked quite well though. Better than a touch interface for one-handed use, I think.
The contact and calendar apps have a good feel to them, and an initial test suggests that unlike Nokia's calendar, all day events work properly. There doesn't seem to be support for folders in the e-mail sync client (other than the inbox, sent folder etc). The device has IMAP IDLE (push) support but unfortunately so far I haven't been able to get its IMAP client to work at all. It seemed to become severely challenged by my 3600+ message inbox so I haven't had a chance to compare push sync e-mail with IMAP IDLE.
Once the remaining testing we plan is completed, we'll be adding some configuration and device-specific information to the web site.

Palm Pre Setup

Here are step-by-step instructions for setting up the Palm Pre to sync with NuevaSync.  Configuration can be done under any PIM application (e-mail, contacts, or calendar) but it is simplest under the calendar or contact applications.  Under e-mail it does auto-configuration guessing that sometimes chooses the wrong server type.

Whether you choose to start configuration from the contacts or calendar app, the configuration is applied to the other apps as well.  (If you don’t use all of them, that is OK, it will still sync.)

1. Open up contacts (or calendar) and go to “Preferences & Accounts”: 
   
   
2. Scroll to the bottom and tap “Add An Account”:
    
   
3. Tap “Microsoft Exchange”:
    
   
4. Then enter your NuevaSync-registered e-mail address and NuevaSync password:
    
   
5. Put https://www.nuevasync.com in the server slot and your username in the username slot.  Leave the domain slot empty.  Tap “Sign In” and you should be syncing.