My goal is to go all wireless and avoid ms outlook. I have been able to do that to some extent with my prior blackberry, but not completely. I have tried Plaxo, funambol, yahoo sync and others - even goosync. However, none really worked very well with the blackberry.

However.....

GooSync works great with WM6.5. It is very fast and I can keep my calendar and contacts with my gmail and not have to have them anywhere else (except on my omnia).

It is set up as an exchange server sync via activesync on the mobile device. Just turn off pc sync by setting your pc connection to only mass storage. This is important so you don't end up with duplicate contacts. I also found that it can erase everything as one sync will compete with another.

So here's what I did:

Ensure all my contacts are in my gmail contacts. Also get my calendar setup in google calendar. These can be imported from outlook or where ever.

Then turn off all pc synchronizations. This is easiest to do by going into activesync and unchecking the boxes in sync settings for calendar and contacts.

Then set up goosync on your device. Here is the page with instructions.

Note: at this point, I don't think it syncs email or tasks, so leave those unchecked. If you get tasks to sync successfully, please post how because I am interested.

Gonna jump in to say that I've been using google sync for some time now. I have had two problems. The first is that, since it uses the one and only exchange account, I had to lose my work email access that I was using. But hey, it's only work! I could live.

However, periodically ActiveSync would get sporadic errors during the sync. These would drive me crazy. Research showed I was not alone and problems have been haunting folk for some time. Usually the only way to fix it was to totally delete the account setup and to re-add it and sync from scratch.

When it worked it was fantastic but sooner or later it would fail. ActiveSync is simply not very good software it seems.

What I ended up doing to solve both of these issues is to use a product called Seven (seven.com). It provides true push mail. Its server is the one polling for your mail then pushing it to you. It supports my work email as well as all my other accounts. It even knows all about Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. All I had to do is put in my email address and password and it completed the setup for me. And it asks if you want to sync your Contacts and Calendar with the Gmail account.

I've been using it now for a couple weeks and I'm pretty impressed. And the consumer version is FREE.

Thanks for the info. I'll definitely watch for that. I'm running 6.5 and it seems to have less issues in general. Better battery life, screen responsiveness, faster, etc. Hopefully, the AS issues are improved as well.

I will definitely check out seven as well.

Jon, a quick seven.com question. I notice it uses international text messaging during the signup process. Have you noticed whether international text messages are sent every time email is pushed? VZW charges $0.25 per international txt sent and $0.20 per received, which could really start to add up if the service txt's at every push.
The notice during signup indicates it is only during setup, but it is not very clear.

After installing the seven application, it appears it keeps a continuous data connection going for monitoring data changes. My device battery is getting sucked up and the back of the phone is getting hot, just like when I surf the web for long periods of time. It has only been 1 hour, but I'm not sure my phone will last another hour at this temperature.
Are you having similar experience with it?

As for the text messages, I was under the impression is was a one time setup thing but you got me curious so I went to check my usage. It seems I've sent 11 of them, none received. It certainly isn't each email pushed for sure as I've had dozens of emails. Now I have some research to do on the subject. Might they be for setting up each account? I have 3 accounts set up and I've had to redo after flashing a couple times so I wonder if that's where the 11 came from. I haven't used any since the 17th and I think that was my last flash. Will try and find out more. I sure won't be using it if it requires many more of these. Kind of defeats the word FREE.

I haven't noticed a battery or heat problem at all since setting up Seven. I've always been fighting battery usage issues and I almost think I've been better off since Seven. I used to only have two accounts and one connected every hour and the other every ten minutes.

I'm going to look around a little more on this subject.

I looked at google sync a while ago, but I had a bad experience where it started randomly emailing reminders to people at work in my contacts not even invited to the said meeting.

I'm sure it was a glitch or something I had done wrong, b ut everyone at work getting reminders about red sox games just doesn't fly

I disagree, GO SOX!!!

Regarding Seven sending international text messages:

I did some research and I think my earlier explanation was close. It seems each time I did a flash to a new ROM, I sent messages to Seven. I see two groupings of messages and they were on the two days I flashed new ROMs. I read where after hard resets or Seven otherwise encounters severe problems is when the texts are sent. Here's a thread at PPCGeeks where it is discussed:

Sprint - Seven beta program is AWESOME - Page 2 - PPCGeeks

The trick to keep this from happening each time you flash (for us flashers anonymous), is to restore a backup of Seven's registry entries. Then it doesn't need to reconfigure the setup as if it's new. I'll be trying to set this up in Sashimi before my next flash.

Aside from the battery drain issue, my device would stop responding. I believe this was driven by seven because I deleted the AS exchange sync with google when I installed seven. When my omnia would lock up (screen off, no response to buttons), I would soft reset and that would hang on the splash screen. After about three soft resets, it would finally come to the home screen, but not before 3 minutes or so.
I removed seven and am going back to goosync for now.

I did post my experience in the seven forums but having seen any response yet. There are a couple posts on their forum where others had similar experience.

By the way, I just noticed GooSync - Google Synchronization. When I started this post, I was referring to google sync, not this other website. Apparently, this website (goosync) costs to sync anything aside from calendar. I'm not sure what it is or how they are getting away with using 'goosync', which was originally part of google's site. It may be part of google for all I know. However, setting up the synchronization through google/activesync directly as detailed here includes contacts and does not cost anything. I presume it will include task sync as well and hopefully soon.

Anyway, after checking out GooSync - Google Synchronization, I dont' think it is as cool and I'm not paying for nuthin! (except what I pay for)

Huh, I just noticed that the forum automatically changed what I typed to a click-able link and not the url. kinda cool