It’s hard to beat the utility of Google Calendar. The app allows you to share and collaborate your calendar with others, makes it possible to view colleagues’ schedules and availability, and generally keeps your hectic life in order.

Google Calendar would be even more useful if you could have mobile access to it. For BlackBerry users, there’s Google Sync, a tool that will seamlessly sync the BlackBerry calendar with Google Calendar. However for Nokia/Symbian phones, useful options are a little more difficult to find. But they do exist; below are three:

GCalsync

Gcalsync is a freeware java program that will sync multiple Google Calendars with your Symbian calendar. Unfortunately, this open-source project lacks an intuitive user interface. Downloading and installing is straightforward, but operation of the application is clunky at best. Each time the application is launched, you must grant it permission to your Symbian calendar, which takes a considerable amount of time and multiple keystrokes. The application does, however, allow for two-way sync, meaning an event you create on your smartphone will be uploaded to your Google Calendar and vice versa. But if an appointment is changed on your phone and the changed parameters are pushed to your Google Calendar, they won’t be reflected there. Also, time zones appear to be problem for GCalSync, with events getting slotted hours later or earlier than intended.

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Yahoo has unveiled a new personalized mobile web content management utility called onePlace. The tool, which will be launched in the second quarter of 2008 as part of Yahoo Go 3.0 (a previously announced mobile application that enables easy access to existing mobile Yahoo services), will be able to track on mobile devices emails, news feeds, web sites, videos, search queries and more.

This means you’ll be able to manage My Yahoo feeds, stock portfolios, Flickr photos and even keep an eye on YouTube, Digg, Facebook and many other sites. Marking content will be as easy as bookmarking it in a browser, according to a company statement. And all web content will be able to be tagged, allowing disparate items to be categorized in a flexible manner.

If onePlace is user-friendly, it will be a powerful force in mobile content aggregation. With Google and Microsoft starting to ramp up their mobile online offerings, this is one area where Yahoo needs to flex their muscle.

Of all the technology subsectors out there right now, the one with the most promise is the mobile platform. This is true for many reasons, notably that:

• Your mobile phone is always on your person, making it a lucrative market for advertisers.
• Most cell-phone consumers are still carrying “dumb” phones but are starting to look at smartphones. This is especially true as the BlackBerry Pearl and $100 Palm Centro are making smartphones more accessible, price-wise.
• Here in the U.S., high-speed mobile broadband networks are becoming more pervasive.
• Web sites are increasingly being offered in impressive mobile versions.

One major barrier to adoption with smartphones is the clunky interface these devices offer. Small screens combined with cramped keyboards, inadequate mobile software, and awkward pointing devices make email writing, web browsing and other common tasks difficult. Continue »