[ATB]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the iPhone instructions (http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html#p=apple) tell you to add an Exchange (ActiveSync) account in your iPhone settings, rather than modify your existing Gmail account.

This is fine and dandy, unless you already have an Exchange account configured, e.g. for your work email. When I went to add another Exchange account, my iPhone told me that "Only one Exchange ActiveSync account can be configured."

Maybe there's a way around this, but Google's dire warnings suggest there isn't ("Important! Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPhone, existing data may be removed from your phone.")

I'll be Googling for a while, but helpful suggestions are appreciated.. (and no, 'suck it iPhone n00b' is not helpful... :))

[icey]

The problem is that it appears Google is using ActiveSync. ActiveSync allows you to sync calendars and contacts as well as your email; so you run into a contention problem - which account is the winner for your calendar? For your contacts? Etc, etc.

It would be nice if the iPhone would let you pick which account owned which data, but I don't think it's sophisticated to do that right now.

So; if you really want to use Google's ActiveSync OVER your exchange server's ActiveSync, you may be able to configure your Exchange account to use IMAP instead of ActiveSync. I don't think you'll have any luck with 2 ActiveSync accounts for the time being.

(For whatever it's worth, I'm in the same position as you; if anyone hears about a way to get multiple ActiveSync accounts running, I'd also love to hear about it.)

[megaman821]

The Palm Pre does this nicely already. I wonder if there is some sore of licensing situation that is preventing Apple from implementing multiple exchange accounts or Apple just doesn't think that their customers need multiple accounts.

[masklinn]

> The Palm Pre does this nicely already.

Yeah but the Pre is based on the idea that your data lives everywhere but on your phone, so it's setup to handle multiple sources of everything and merging them correctly.

The iPhone's software was built with the idea that you have one central identity server (either your mac or an exchange server), so it handle multiple "main" sources… not at all.

[icey]

I would guess it's the latter. I mean.. we don't even have MMS yet, and it was huge news when we got copy & paste.

[sjs]

I can use MMS (and tethering) on my iPhone with Rogers in Canada.

[masklinn]

> Perhaps I'm missing something, but the iPhone instructions (http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html#p=apple) tell you to add an Exchange (ActiveSync) account in your iPhone settings, rather than modify your existing Gmail account.

You aren't. The goal is to have push gmail, and Apple's gmail client doesn't handle push. So the choices are mobileme (which Google can't access), Yahoo Mail (same) or ActiveSync.