iCloud and my 3G phone

Kultiras wrote:

Furthermore, if you buy a G3 you know what it can do. Its not fair to get upset that something which has been invented years later doesn't work on it. Its just great that some people take time to come up with solutions to do make old hardware work with cool new features. But that doesn't mean it have to be supported.

I don't think most 3G owners are complaining that we can't use new innovations like iCloud. I think it's that Apple has intentionally broken features they included in marketing materials. Selling Internet syncing as a phone (and desktop, btw) feature and then pulling the rug out from under us is sleazy corporate behavior.

IMAP is an open standard that works fine with my 3G. Calendar and contact syncing has been disabled for no logical reason except to force hardware upgrades, an option that is not available to some.

Thanks all for this post (especially Keithfromtoronto), took me 3 hours, but i got there! I Personally was upgrading from a MobileMe account to icloud on my iphone 3G. i followed the instructions found here but had a few differences. This is what i had to do:

1. I followed keithfromtoronto's instructions as per his post on page 9. (Thanks again, Keith!)

Afterwards i could receive emails via icloud but not send them. Contacts and Calendars didn't work either. To sort the email I had to add my Password into the Primary Server: Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calenders > Accounts: icloud > Outgoing Mail Server: SMTP > Primary Server: smtp.me.com . Outgoing Mail Server: Password...

- I also had to adjust my 'default (email) account' as it selected some random email after I delelted the MobileMe account.

I then accessed my icloud account through my web browser and could see confirmation that my Contacts and Calendars had not uploaded. iCal also did not show any Calendars relating to iCloud. So:

2. On my MacBook: Apple Menu > System Preferences > Mail Contacts & Calendars. There was no icloud listed in the left hand column just my other accounts. So i clicked on the icloud symbol on the right hand side and it took a few minutes but it sync'd and added an icloud account to the left. I selected the account & the window on the right hand side then gave me options to 'tick' so I selected 'Mail & Notes', 'Contacts', 'Calendars' & 'Bookmarks'. It sync'd again.

I checked on my icloud account (still open in my browser) and it began uploading my contacts! But not the Calendars, so:

3. I accessed my future appointments in the iphone and moved them individually by 'Editing' them and changing their 'Calendar' setting by moving them into a Calendar listed under the heading "https://caldav.icloud.com....." I also unchecked all the Calendars listed under "From My Mac".

4. When following these instructions from keithfromtoronto's post:

"Go Settings>Mail, Contacts,Calendars> and touch the name of the account you just created to open the settings so we can do one more edit. Touch Advanced Settings. Select and highlight the WHOLE of the Account URL beginning with https://p01-caldav.icloud etc In the middle of this URL is your Unique User ID in the form of a string of numbers. Move back one screen to the CalDAV Account Information screen. Note that the Server name starts with p01-caldav.icloud.com Delete this whole server name and paste the name you just copied in its place. Click Done and wait for the account settings to update."

...I noticed that on my phone there was no "p01-" infront of caldav. So I manually added this in both places as he says it should be above.

Then on my iphone > Settings > Mail, Contacts Calendars > Calenders: Default Calendar... I changed this to the Calender that i added my future events to.

After a few minutes I checked my icloud account and my Calendar had sync'd. I re-opened iCal, that too had sync'd.

RESULT! Thank you for your help and hope this post helps someone as much as keith's post helped me.

All good observations. "The devil is in the details" with these things

I share your frustration. I guess the rationalization is that MobileMe was a paid subscription while iCloud is free. The quid pro quo is that it is free on the newest operating systems which run only on the newest hardware. Having said that the workarounds in this thread and in other excellent threads on this forum do work to make iCloud features work on older phones but you will need to take a quiet hour and pick your way through all the settings.

I saw some comments about MobleMe being shut down in June 2012. If I create a new @me.com account for my wife, and use the instructions contained in this thread to set up email on her 3G, will it stop working in June? I'd like to avoid the doghouse... 😝

You can no longer create a MobileMe account, you will be creating a @me.com account under iCloud. It will not go away on June 30th.

Great, thanks for the help!

As deggie says, there is no more MobileMe. They are keeping it going for existing users until end of June. It is replaced by a similar bundle of services under a new name iCloud, but iCloud will not run on a 3g phone

To add an @me account to a 3G phone you will have to set it up as a regular IMAP mailbox using the instructions in these posts. Ditto if you want to add Contacts and Calendar. iCloud is really just a "bundle" of services which are otherwise standard services: IMAP mailboxes, CALDAV calendars and CARDDAV address books. If you have the server names etc as provided in these posts you can set the services up individually on a 3G phone, thus mimicking iCloud functionality

deggie and keith, thanks! I got both the email and calendar working last night, should be able to get the contacts set up when I have time.

I was also having issues with syncing my calendar and tried this to get it to work. I don't know if it is described elsewhere in this post, but I tried changing the p01 to p02 keeping the rest of the path the same and I got it to work. All the other information is as described in this post. There may be something associated to each individual phone that requires a different path or server. Just my thought. Also I just have an iTunes account which I used to make this work.

Thank you Puregeof !!🙂 A good bit of research!

First, thanks to all who have provided a solution for what I consider an attempt by Apple to "encourage" people to buy hardware they don't actually need. As has been discussed, there is nothing new about the mail/calendar/contact hardware at Apple's farms. There are things older hardware simply cannot take advantage of and that's fine. The ethical thing for Apple to do (admittedly, this is my personal opinion, of course) would be to provide the details needed by older hardware to access what they could while mentioning the advantages of what newer hardware would provide. In point of fact, Apple actually did provide the instructions for accessing Mail on older hardware. The link may be somewhere in the other 9 pages of posts here but the page is at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4864 However, I notice that it is a pretty new document! It's barely a week old!

The main thing I notice in the above mentioned site is that there is no use of the weird "p01" or other non-intuitive prefix before the industry standard "imap.domain..." address. It's working fine on my 3G, both sending and receiving mail. I've not even attempted setting up a calendar or contacts. Hopefully, they will also produce similar documents for Calendar and Contacts. :-)

Well, my pritties-- After struggling with calendars & contacts for freakin' DAYS I finally decided to ditch 3.1.3 and 'downgrade' to 4.2.1 and, duh, both calendars and contacts synced on the very first attempt. Give it a try, folks, before you do yourself in. Love y'alls!

bigdatty wrote:

I finally decided to ditch 3.1.3 and 'downgrade' to 4.2.1 and, duh, both calendars and contacts synced on the very first attempt.

I worry that this is the real solution. I can't abide the upgrade to iOS 4.x. It magically transforms a 3G into a tortoise.

OMG I would go ballistic....