02. July 2009 · 6 comments · Categories: iPhone

You receive your sparkly newiPhone, plug it into your Mac, everything works – and calendars are synced. A few days later you realise that all is not well as calendar updates only make the jump when you physically connect phone to the Mac and sync, but MobileMe’s supposed to sync over the air with push updates and all that jazz. Turns out you need to do the following, which isn’t entirely intuitive:

  • Perform a full physical sync to ensure all data on phone is on your Mac and therefore in the MobileMe system.
  • On the iPhone go to Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars
  • Select your me.com/mac.com Mail account
  • Turn on the switches for syncing contacts, calendar and bookmarks as you wish.
  • This will ask what you want to do with the data already on the phone. Select “Do not merge” and then when prompted agree that it can indeed delete the existing data from your phone.
  • Et voila, all your data is still there and changes you make on Mac or iPhone swiftly wing their way across the void to the others.

6 Comments

  1. Thank you very much! You’re right: this isn’t intuitive. I had apparently previously merged the data, thus duplicating all my contacts and calendars. I learned I needed to turn off MobileMe syncing to delete one set of data, but I couldn’t figure out how to delete the other set so I could re-enable MobileMe syncing. Your instructions did the trick!

  2. Excellent Advice! I had the same problem and this fixed it!

  3. HELP! I did what you said and indeed all worked well…for 24hours! for some reason today when I enter something into my iphone calendar it does not appear in the Mac ICal nor in MobileMe’s website… any thoughts as to what I should do?

  4. George, I can’t think what the problem would be. It’s still working fine for me many months on.

  5. George
    My phone does not offer a don’t merge option It’s just merge or cancel Any ideas

  6. Same with my iphone. It just says would you like to Merge. I click no. but then I can’t add the mobile me account.

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