Quit Pushing Buttons!

For some time now I have been accusing my wife of pressing buttons on the phone in the middle of our conversations. At least once in every phone our conversation is interrupted by the distinctive tone of a button press. I'm not the only one to notice this either, as other folks she speaks with regularly also remark on how, occasionally, they hear a button press mid-call. My wife is certain that she isn't pressing anything, and is perplexed as to how this is happening. In investigating a solution to a different problem, I think I might have found the answer.

Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signaling is the technology that allows us to navigate those infuriating customer support menus. Also known as touch-tone dialing, DTMF employs the use of multiple frequencies to create a dual tone sound in the normal voice band (we can hear it) over an analog phone line. The receiver on the other end of the call can listen for these specific frequency combinations to know that a button has been pressed and react to that action in some manner.

DTMF is great when you are using an analog phone line, but VoIP and cell phones use digital signals. In order to be compatible with plain old telephone service (POTS) phones, digital phone systems will use a variety of techniques for recognizing button presses. Unfortunately, some of those techniques can be fooled by a female voice. I think this is what is happening on our phone conversations. It looks like I need to go make an apology.

We do not have a landline phone. Instead, we both carry cell phones (Verizon) and use them for all of our calling. In addition, I use Google Voice for making and receiving calls. So now the question is: which product in the chain of communication is introducing these false DTMF tones?

Have you noticed this with anyone you speak to frequently? If so, what is the chain of communication that is resulting in the errant tone? Ours is:

LG Flip Phone <-> Verizon <-> Google Voice <-> Verizon <-> Motorola DROID

Google Sync

After I gave up my BlackBerry, I switched back to using my Dell Axim PDA. I'm very happy with it, and I'm having great luck with Windows Mobile 6.1 One thing that I have struggled with is to find a way to synchronize my mobile calendar, contacts, and e-mail with my Google calendar, contacts, and e-mail. Actually, I should not include e-mail, as that was always easy to do. You can synchronize either via POP or IMAP, whichever you prefer.

So next up was calendar synchronization. My goal was to find a solution that would synchronize my work calendar with my google calendar, and both my Google and work calendars onto my PDA. The first app I tried for this was Google Calendar Sync for Mobile Devices (GCSfMD). This is an application that runs on a Windows Mobile 5.0 or later device and synchronizes the calendar data on the PDA with the Google Calendar. The advantage here is that my work calendar would sync to my device, and then GCSfMD would modify the calendar to also include my Google Calendar appointments. Unfortunately GCSfMD is a one way sync. If I change an appointment on my Google Calendar my device is updated, but if I change an appointment on my device, the Google Calendar is unaltered. So my next attempt was to use Google Calendar Sync. Although the two have very similar names, they behave in very different ways. Google Calendar Sync synchronizes your Outlook calendar directly with your Google Calendar. It is a two-way sync, so if you update either your Outlook Calendar or your Google Calendar, the updates are synchronized between both. This is a great app, and I have gotten great use out of it the last few weeks.

This left contact synchronization. There simply is no good solution for synchronizing Outlook Contacts and Google Contacts. Likewise, the only application that I found that will synchronize my mobile contacts with Google Contacts is OggSync.

Fortunately, today Google released Google Sync. Google Sync works with Windows Mobile and iPhone devices to synchronize both the Calendar and Contacts with your Google data. Best of all, it required no installation on my PDA! I simply modified my ActiveSync setup to point to the Google Mobile server, and everything synced up perfectly.

A couple of questions you might have:

• Why not just use the device web browser to check the Google sites directly?

That would be perfectly acceptable...if my device were a phone. It isn't, and I don't want to pay the extraordinary rates carriers are asking for all you can eat data service. By synchronizing my device, the data is available offline. So even if I'm in the car I still have access to all my calendar, contact, and e-mail data.

• How do you merge the data?

I still need Google Calendar Sync. Google Sync will sync your device data with your Google data, but it will not merge with your Outlook data. I still use Google Calendar Sync to merge my Google Calendar with my Outlook calendar. There is still no solution for merging my contact data, but I'm okay with this because I can live with only having my personal contacts on my device.

• Can I sync my device with both Google and Outlook?

At this time, no. Windows Mobile and iPhone both restrict you to a single synchronization source. You'll need to decide how you want to approach it. For me, I've chosen to make Google my primary data provider, and I sync all of the other data with Google. You may prefer to sync with your Outlook data, in which case you will need to find alternative applications to sync up.

In an ideal world, my device would sync and store all of my various calendars, contacts, e-mail, and data from as many sources as I wanted. Until then, the combination of Google Sync and Google Calendar Sync will fill the void.

Google Calendar Sync

I am giving up my BlackBerry in at work and reverting back to the use of my PDA (thus the previous posts looking for a cell phone).  As part of this process, I've been looking into different ways of keeping sync'ed, both with my work items and home items.  I tried an open source product called GMobileSync from RareEdge.  On paper it had everything I wanted - it would pull appointments from my Google Calendar and put them on my PDA calendar, and would also push appointments on my PDA to my Google Calendar.  This would allow me to use my PDA as a single source for all of my home and office appointments (and would allow my wife to easily check my availability for doctor's appointments or schedule me as away for any family related things).  Unfortunately, the execution is quite there.  The code is at version 1.3.6, and while it will update my PDA with appointments from my GCal, it won't go the other way (NullReferenceError).  I considered grabbing the code and debugging it, but I'd rather have a solution that just works out of the box.

Enter Google Calendar Sync from Google.  This application runs on the desktop rather than on the PDA, but it does 2-way synchronization between your Outlook calendar and your Google Calendar.  This is perfect, because my PDA syncs with my Outlook calendar anyway.  Now all of my work appointments show up on my Google Calendar, and all of my personal appointments show up on my Outlook calendar.

Google Talk

I'm a big fan of most of the apps that Google has put forth. When Google Talk was first introduced, I immediately tried to get as many people as I could to switch over. It was such an improvement over my existing IM tools (Yahoo and MSN). The biggest thing for me was that it didn't pollute the interface with ads, gadgets, tools, and other crap. It let you instant message, and that was it. There were no ads. The built-in voice chat was actually easy to use out of the box. It was great!

But that was almost four years ago. Google has since released three additional versions of the chat client, while not making any significant improvements to the original Google Talk desktop app. Your choices now are:

The Google Talk Desktop App
The Google Talk Desktop App, Labs Edition
The Google Talk Gadget (Web Version)
Google Talk in GMail

As well as customized versions for the iPhone and BlackBerry. To further confuse the issue, the various versions to do not have complementary features. The original desktop version does not have group chat, but does have voice chat. The new Labs version has group chat, but no voice chat. The GMail version permits communicating with your AOL IM contacts, but not in the original desktop App. The web gadget and the Labs addition appear identical to me so far, but I haven't dug that deeply. And they are all labeled "beta". So which am I supposed to use?

For a while I used Pidgin, which allowed me to run one application and connect to all of my instant messaging services. I stopped because it was not very reliable at staying connected. I haven't used it for over a year now, and several new releases have been issued. If you use a lot of different clients, I highly recommend it.

Getting back to my point, the Google Talk situation is a mess. Google really needs to have a sit down with the product manager for Google Talk and get his mind right. There are too many versions with too many variations of features.