Google just made a new tool available in their battle for the desktop: Google Calendar. The calendar tool looks pretty much like what you would expect from a calendar tool.


A configurable view representing one or more days, and the appointments that were made. At work, I use Oracle Calender, and Google looks pretty much the same.

A few remarks:

  1. One of the notification options is to be notified by SMS of an appointment. This is a good idea, however it is only available in the USA. I am not in the USA, therefore I cannot receive the notifications. Will this change? Hopefully.

  2. The strength of an electronic calendar is that you can easily share it with your colleagues. However, the ability to synchronize it with a handheld device is very important to me. Not only does it not appear to be supported, there is completely no mention in any of the helpfiles.


So, while the web interface pretty much appears to have what I am looking for, the lack of synchronization features is a show stopper for me. I can live without SMS notifications.

Oh, and while most of my "real" email comes to me via gmail, and I do use the personalized Google news, I think that's pretty much all the data that I am giving them. At least, until it becomes clear what the company's long-term goals are, and how they plan to use the data that they are collecting.