How do I sync iPod calendar with iCal?

Hello everyone,

I have just been bought a new iPod touch as a birthday present. Since I have never had a device that operates like a smart phone before (I know it's not exactly a smart phone), I thought I would begin to use it as a diary, note-taker etc. I have always done these things on paper, but now I think it would be a good idea to have them synchronized between iPod and computer.

My laptop is running Snow Leopard, which I believe is too old to exploit iCloud. So I have been trying to find out the "old fashioned" way of syncronizing an iPod and iCal on my laptop. I thought it would do it automatically during the usual iTunes sync, but apparently not. And I've found surprisingly little information on the web.

What I have done so far is try to set up an account on iCal. I clicked to add a new account, selected "Automatic" for account type, put my usual Gmail address in the e-mail address bar, and my Gmail password in the password bar. Then clicked create.

But as soon as I now try to enter anything in the calender, an error message comes up (I have redacted the event name and my Gmail username):

The server responded with an error.

Access to “[EVENT NAME]” in “[MY GMAIL USERNAME]@googlemail.com” in account “[MY GMAIL USERNAME]@gmail.com” is not permitted.

The server responded:

“HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden”

to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation.

Seems as though some mismatch between "gmail" and "googlemail" is the problem?

Anyway, I'm not even sure I want to start using Google calendar – that was just what iCal automatically gave me. Is there not an Apple equivalent (not iCloud) that would make things more compatible?

Since I'm starting from scratch, I thought this would be easy, but no such luck!

Thanks for any help!

Jon