Google Sync 0.5.9 for BlackBerry: What A Royal Pain

For the last four days, I'm dealing with the consequences of upgrading my BlackBerry Curve to Google Sync 0.5.9, with Contacts.

Even though the Curve is now gone to a different user, and I'm working with GMail and G1, but the consequences of a botched release are still biting me in the back.

Over two hundred entries in the address book, most of them with 7 or 8 postal address copies. Yes, for some reason it is either seven or eight - guess that was a number of attempts the sync application made before I realized that each new attempt is making things worse and shut it off.

Same for phone numbers - there's lots of duplicates. Each notation for a number (999-999-9999, 999.999.9999, (999) 999-9999, you name it) gets a unique entry.

I'm not even talking about NullPointerException.

Good thing I don't have to deal with the BlackBerry address book anymore, I can only imagine how much time I would've spent on putting that in order.

But still, it's bee quite a few hours by now, and time is money. And I'm not the only one affected, and there's a lot of people that are much less capable of fixing this problem, or having enough time to deal with it.

And four days later, Google is mum. As if they've released an update on Friday night and went on vacation. But wait, it was Wednesday.

I would say that this is a black eye on Google's PR. There's no update, and there's no apology.

Nothing is going to bring back hours of my life that I wasted on fixing Google's screwup, but a little "we're sorry" would make me feel just a little bit better.