I've held out for a year. I didn't want the original iPhone for a variety of reasons (mostly to do with the broken Bluetooth support, and partly to do with the lack of 3G). In the past year, there have been five or six incidents where I've said "(*@#^%, I wish I had an iPhone right now, and I'd just ...". Enough. I'm prepared to deal with the baked in limitations of the iPhone and go get one. I'm unsure whether I want to burn half of tomorrow waiting in line, but anyway, time for the questions.

Over the past few years, I've allowed Google to take over my life. That's where I read my email. It's where I keep my calendar (and where my wife also keeps her's, so we can share calendars effortlessly). My contacts are presently in Apple's Address Book on my home computer and are increasingly out of date. (My wife keeps her contacts in an Excel spreadsheet, originally made for our wedding's RSVP list.) Since Google still fails to offer a to-do manager, I've got all of that in Remember The Milk, which even offers a clever browser plug-in to integrate it with Gmail.

I know that the iPhone plays nicely with Gmail via IMAP. The question is how I should manage contacts, calendar, and to-do lists. I suppose I could pony up for MobileMe, but Google's services are free and are (arguably) superior.

I understand that iSync will, once you introduce your computer to an iPhone, sprout some new functionality to sync Address Book with Google's Contacts. Given how much auto-added junk there is in my Google Contacts, this may or may not be a feature.

One tempting tool is Spanning Sync. They deal with the calendar in a way that seems mostly rational, and they deal with contact synchronization in their current beta releases. What's less clear is whether they can deal with three Macs (home, work, laptop) and the iPhone without everything getting all confused.

BusySync knows how to sync calendars, but doesn't know anything about contacts.

What I'd *really* want is to make Google be the center of the universe and sync everything from Google direct to the iPhone and the Macs. I'm assuming, at least for now, that this isn't going to work.

Thoughts? Am I missing something?