How to Move Your Data to the iPhone 3G

From music to contacts to your favorite bookmarks, here's how to integrate an iPhone—3G or otherwise—into your digital life.

As another, failed, wireless carrier once said, don't call it a phone. With Apple's iPhone 2.0 software update, it doesn't matter if you spring for the iPhone 3G or hold onto your first-generation iPhone. Either way, you get a top-quality handset with a revolutionary touch-screen interface. Pair it with your desktop or laptop PC, though, and it becomes so much more than that.

This guide will show you how. It's intended for beginners who have never owned a smartphone before, though some of the tips can also help experienced users. Whether you just got home with your brand new iPhone 3G, or you want to improve the way you synchronize your current iPhone, here's what you need to know.

Note: Apple has revamped the activation process for the iPhone 3G compared with the original iPhone. So if you're buying one, you'll need to activate it in the store, rather than taking it home and activating it from your computer. Meanwhile, if you're upgrading an existing iPhone to an iPhone 3G, you'll want to hook your old one into iTunes and synchronize it first, before you get started with the new one.

Synchronize your media. First, download and install the free iTunes 7.7 application and set up an Apple iTunes Store account per Apple's instructions. You'll need to do both of these things to get started. iTunes will let you manage your music, movies, television shows, and iPhone applications (including games) on both your iPhone and your desktop (be it a Mac or a PC). iTunes will also synchronize photos from iPhoto on a Macintosh. For PC users, iTunes will grab photos from Adobe Photoshop Album, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and any picture folder (including My Pictures) on your PC and then synchronize them with the iPhone.

Synchronize your address book and calendar. Mac users are good to go right out of the box. Not only will iTunes take care of the aforementioned media files and applications, but the iPhone will also connect to your Mac's Address Book, iCal, Mail, and Microsoft Entourage applications and synchronize that data as well. If you're on a PC, iTunes will pick up Outlook and Outlook Express data, but not data from any of Vista's built-in apps. For webmail users, the iPhone can automatically synchronize contacts from Google Contacts and Yahoo! Address book. The same goes for Web-based e-mail itself; while the iPhone doesn't sync AOL contacts, it does synchronize with AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts.

Synchronize your Web bookmarks. If you use Safari on the desktop—either on a Mac or on a PC—you can synchronize your bookmarks with your iPhone. On the other hand, the iPhone can't synchronize Firefox bookmarks or Internet Explorer favorites; instead, install Safari, export the bookmarks to a file, import them into Safari, and then synchronize your iPhone to transfer them over.

Synchronize your data wirelessly. MobileMe, Apple's replacement for its old .Mac service, isn't required for you to use your iPhone. But for $99 per year, along with some other helpful features, it lets you synchronize your calendar, contact, Safari bookmarks, and other data wirelessly. (Note: Apple has largely cleaned up the widely publicized issues that early MobileMe adopters ran into, and is now offering a 30-day credit to those users.)

Synchronize your workplace data—but heed this warning. If you connect your iPhone into your workplace Exchange server, you'll be able to sync your e-mail, contacts, and calendar over the air—even without MobileMe. But there's a catch. If you do this, you'll lose the ability to sync your personal data, even if you subscribe to MobileMe. You can connect to only one or the other, for reasons that still elude me.

Retain access to your PC at all times. If you want to access your PC's files from your iPhone, you may want to look into Syncplicity. There are plenty of services like it—Avvenu (which Nokia now owns) and SoonR immediately come to mind. But Syncplicity recently launched an iPhone-specific page at m.syncplicity.com: When the site detects that you're using an iPhone, it redirects to this iPhone-formatted page. Syncplicity is free for up to 2GB of storage and syncing two computers (not counting the iPhone); it's $9.99 per month for the 40GB plan and an unlimited number of computers.