HTC Desire and Exchange Calendar

At the weekend, I picked up a shiny new HTC Desire, which has first-class support for GMail, including Google Apps. It also has support for Exchange ActiveSync.

Unfortunately (from my point of view), turning on ActiveSync also enforces mobile device policy. Since our IT bods have turned this on (and I’m not going to blame them for this), this requires a strong password to be set on the handset.

This is annoying, because I like the visual password, and typing a strong password’s a bit fiddly, even with the (rather good) on-screen keyboard.

On the other hand, I only want access to my calendar (and reminders), not my email, so I don’t really see the need for a strong password.

My solution: Install Google Calendar Sync and use that to push my calendar from Outlook on my desktop PC up to my Google Apps account.

As an extra: Google Calendar has a cool feature, where you can share your calendar with other people on your domain, and you can see their calendars. These calendars are shown in different colours in the main calendar screen, and the Android calendar app is smart enough to display the correct colours.

So, by setting up another user account and calendar (work@…), setting this as the target for Google Calendar Sync, and showing it in my normal account with a different colour, I now get to see my work appointments in a different colour from my personal reminders.

Cool.