iPhone/iPod Touch SyncML clients

The iPhone is now over a month old, and good news, there are two SyncML clients available.  I’ve had the opportunity to play with both briefly.

Funambol is the free/opensource offering, it worked reasonably well in iPhone OS 2.0.0, but since upgrading to 2.0.1, it appears to perform a slowsync on every synchronization, resulting in potential duplicates, as well as the inability to delete items on either side.  For this reason, I’m not recommending it at this time.

Synthesis’ SyncML client is currently free, but will become a paid commercial product in the future, once Calendar support is added.

The initial version of the Synthesis client didn’t function at all with MDaemon’s SyncML server, Synthesis reported that the problem was fixed over a week ago, but it was just finally approved by Apple last night, and so far, it works great.

This is my current personal choice for SyncML client, I will post a more detailed review down the road once I have a bit more experience with it.

In both cases, the clients only support synchronizing the Contacts database, not the Calendar database (Apple didn’t bother with a Calendar API), nor Tasks (Apple didn’t bother to write a Tasks application)