Getting Google Calendar on your Nokia Tablet

So I finally figured out the simplest way to get Google Calendar info locally on the Tablet… It’s relatively simple given the amount of effort I thought was required. You do not need to use a third party system like ScheduleWorld or GooSync (which does not work), you simply subscribe to your Calendar’s private (or public) iCal feed. You can easily view your Google Calendar online, but I’ve had trouble getting events to add. My guess is that the Ajax is a tad tricky for the Opera browser to really manage — not too unlike my experience with Google Reader actually.

You’ll need to actually install a calendar on your Nokia since there isn’t one thee by default and for the time being I would recommend GPE-Calendar, which is a nice work in progress. I’m not going to get into how you need to add repositories in order to install software here as that will make this more complex than need be. If you don’t know what that means, your probably reading the wrong post. If you have GPE-Calendar installed already, you are all set.

It’s probably best to start in Google Calendar in order to get the details we need to make things work back on the tablet… In Google Calendar, click on Settings, then Calendars and the name of the calendar you want to use. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll find the ical and rss options for your calendar. I am using the private ical link in GPE-Calendar and as you would expect you’ll need to also use your Google Calendar login credentials in order to view things on your device. I emailed the .ics URL to myself so I could have it locally on my tablet as the address is pretty long. From within email on your Nokia, you can simply copy it to your clipboard as you’ll need it in a minute or two…

Back in GPE_Calendar — From the menu, choose Tools, then Calendars. When the window opens, you want to tap the paper icon, which will create a new calendar or you can edit the default calendar if you prefer. Regardless, you need modify the settings… Under Type, you’ll need to switch things from Local to Subscribe and paste or enter the ical URL we noted from Google. After you enter your Google Credentials in the boxes below, and adjust the sync frequency, you are done. Click save, and you’ll be back at the Calendar list. You can tap the down arrow icon which should now be in the line next to your calendar’s name. This will manually begin the process… be patient, as it may take a few min and GPE may appear to hang.

There are three bummers here aside from actually having to install a calendar on what seems like it would be a natural PDA already. If you can live with these for now while things evolve, you’ll be all set:

  • First, you can only subscribe. Changes made on the tablet are not sent back as a limitation of GPE Calendar. This means that you will receive whatever is on Google regardless of what you may have done locally… Hopefully this will be enabled as a two way option at some point in the near future as there is quite a bit of enthusiasm around the Nokia Tablet right now.
  • I’ve also discovered that alarms you’ve set for events do not travel… I’m less concerned about this for now since I get alerts on my phone via SMS as well as on my desktop from Google’s Notifier, but it seems like something that should really just work.
  • The last thing is a bit odd. When you sync, the CPU spikes and basically stalls things. I don’t know why downloading info like a calendar would do this but it does. Again, something that will hopefully be worked in the near future.

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37 Replies to “Getting Google Calendar on your Nokia Tablet”

  1. Hi Johanathan,

    I,m seriously looking at purchasing the N800 but my main purpose would be for business use. Would you know if i would be able to dowload microsoft office/vista on the N800?

    Look forward to your advice.

    Regards,
    Anver.

  2. There is no office like suite yet that I’ve found and google docs does not support the N800’s browser. I just tried zoho writer and while it loaded (and looks very cool) the ajax is a tad too complex for the browser to understand where a text entry point might be. I will have to try with my bluetooth keyboard and see if that works. Could be pretty slick if it does. They have a plugin for office which let’s you save right to the web,

    The Nokia tablets run a version of debian linux called maemo which is optmized for small devices. You can use VNC and possibly rdesktop to do remote connects to windows (rd,vnc), mac (vnc)and linux (vnc) which works well btw.

    For true mobile office connectivity, this might not suit your needs – though it’s really a great extension to the mobile experience regardless.

  3. I subscribed to my google calendars but none of them show up on my n800. I wonder what I did wrong?

  4. Yes. I have set them up as private. My iCal can “sync” with them but not my n800. The n800 shows the calendars was downloaded (1 minutes ago..etc) but nothing shows up on the tablet.

    I also emailed myself those links and do the copy & paste like you did. I have tried with & without account user name / password…neither methods worked.

  5. I’ve found that the sync can take a while – sometimes essentialy freezing GPE-Cal in the process, but eventually things chill out and my calendar is updated.w

  6. I am having the exact same problem as Av8ors.

    Another symptom is that the Calendar won’t close unless the device is completely restarted. Is this what you define as “freeze”? Everything in the calendar seems to work fine though, but the imported events don’t show up on the calendar.
    It’s been unclosable for about half an hour.

    I am not expecting you to give tech-support here, just informing others about my problem 😉

    I am sure I will get this to work eventually, because I reeeaaaly need it.
    (and I installed it from here: http://ossostage.cidercone.com/%7Eferenc/, in case that might be part of the problem)

  7. Not sure what to offer here – mine just works. It could seriously be a lot better, but for now view only is fine as I also have Google Calendar two-way sync on my phone so I’m never too far away from the latest update in my day.

  8. Hello. I tried to have a google calendar on my N800 but it crashed GPE Calendar while syncing. Then trying to launch GPE calendar again and again it crashes 3 seconds after coming to the screen. Then I switched off the wifi, launched calendar again, closed it, switched on the wifi, launched calendar, and it worked !
    Then I tried to add other google calendars but it has the same behaviour 🙁 : GPE calendar crashes everytime it is launched (at least the window disappear). No way to keep the window open, except if I switch off the wifi.
    Is it possible to watch several google calendars with GPE calendar ?

  9. I only sync my main calendar so I can’t say whether it really works on multiple or not unfortunately. GPE Cal does not crash (close) on me, but it can take a few minutes to update after I open it.

    Sounds like your crash is due to updating more than one at a time. Try doing a single calendar, update and then add another to see what happens…

    Obviously, this would be much easier if Nokia had their own calendar, but they seem opposed to that for some reason at the moment.

  10. ok. I had the same problem as Eric.

    I used one calendar (My Calendar).
    I also removed the “http://” from the url so that the url reads
    http://www.scheduleworld.com/sw/webDAVDIR/some.ics

    for example.

    That seemed to stop the crashing although I don’t see any updates yet.

    If you want to save your calendar data before attempting this, in the terminal do:

    gpe-calendar -e somefilenam

    You can import the data back in through the gui.

    James.

  11. Oops. I spoke too soon.

    Scheduleworld does not work (nothing happens), and the http:// is required for a sync to take place.

    gpe-calendar still crashes when attempting to connect to google calendar.
    It does not crash if the Internet connection is disabled. I get the following console output:

    Updating My Calendar
    The profile contains the unsupported custom attribute X-WR-CALNAME.
    The profile contains the unsupported custom attribute X-WR-TIMEZONE.
    The profile contains the unsupported custom attribute X-LIC-LOCATION.
    Segmentation fault

    If the Internet connection is disabled, the gpe-calendar will come up with the calendar entries showing from Google calendar.

    So, I guess it is not possible with this version (0.73-21) of gpe-calendar. I read somewhere that somebody re-compiled and then it worked. I will see if I can find the package.

  12. I have figured out the problem that I, Av8ors, clq and others are having. If you have recurring events in your google calendar, gpe-calendar cannot import them and will fail. I found this out by emailing myself the iCal file from google and using the File->Import method in gpe-calendar. It complains immediately about the RRULE. So, I removed the recurring items from my google calendar, and then was able to sync gpe-calendar from google directly. However, after the sync, gpe-calendar died, but on restart, the calendar events were visible.
    So, apparently the writer of gpe-calendar did not include parsing for RRULES in the application. Too bad, IMHO.

    Hope this helps everyone!

    — Kevin

  13. Pretty sure my repeating events work… I’ve got a few items that show up without issue.

    This is excellent info though – not sure why I am having more success than you guys.

  14. Odd, did you add recurring events after you were initially able to sync? There was no way I could get the sync to work, and it failed silently. Like I said, importing the iCal file reported the errors in the RRULE line, but I don’t know why. Maybe there was something in my recurring event that is somewhat specific to my event. Mine were all annual events (if that makes any difference), things like birthdays, anniversaries.

    Maybe the maintainer of the program will see these comments, and be able to figure something out.

  15. My repeating events were in GCal before I did my sync and they definitely work on my tablet. When GPE-Cal initially launches it connects and seems to freeze. It takes a few min to settle and the my calendar is up to date. I don’t have alarms, but that’s OK as I also sync my GCal to my phones so I get an SMS alert there.

  16. Well, I experimented a little, downloading the ical file and trying to import it. This shows me what the error is when trying to import.

    First try I got some error along the lines of missing field7description or so.. I went into my calendar settings in gcal and put in a description (which was previously lacking). I then tried again, this time it told me I had invalid characters. Me being Norwegian my calendar included the letters Æ, Ø, Ã…. I mostly write my calendar entries in English anyway, so names and places were mostly the problem. Having eliminated the æøå I got yet a new error message: “syntax error (wrong parameter syntax)!” (horrible American spelling intentional ;P). Here I am stuck, anyone have any idea what this error might be?

  17. Synchronizing Outlook …
    I found a free program at gmigrate.com that migrates Outlook calendar to Google. Once that was done I just followed these instructions, and after waiting a bit, it was all transferred to my N800. Thanks.

  18. Hi
    Erminig 0.2.0 is available.
    http://code.google.com/p/erminig/

    Features:
    two way sync
    recurrent events and exceptions (deleted single ocurrence)
    creating/modifying/deleting events

    What does not work :
    Moving an event to a calendar to another
    Changing a single event to recurrent event

    Be careful and make tests with test calendars.

    I will be happy if you send me a quick message if it works or not.

    David.

  19. I saw your comment on GooSync, which you say does not work – well, I just installed it yesterday on my N95 and I can say that it works fine as far as I can tell.

    What issues did you have with it?

  20. Hi there. . I used your guidelines to set up my calendar and it worked beautifully!

    That was, until a couple of days ago when it suddenly decided to not work anymore. I get an unable to resolve hostname error.

    Any ideas what changed?

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