Travel Technology - Shared calendar: iphone/iphone/ipad...

I'm going to be getting a new phone and I'm leaning towards the iphone 4s (Verizon), I currently have an android phone.

One thing that I want to do is have a 2-way shared/combined calendar with my wife which we can both access/update from our phones (she has an iphone), as well as her ipad. Basically a virtual version of the old paper calendar in the kitchen that has everyone's schedule.

I've done a little researching, and on apple's website it talks about sharing calendars with iCloud. What I can't figure out is if by "sharing", they mean I would only have the ability to look at her calendar, or if by "sharing" they mean having a combined calendar like I want. Can anyone clarify this?

If the iCloud sharing is not what I want... Does anyone have any experience with a good app that will accomplish this?

And the last question... If I were to go with another android phone or a blackberry, does anyone know of an app that would allow for calendar sharing between that and my wife's iphone?

THANKS

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I set up a separate Google account for my family's shared calendar and gave everyone access to that. Works great on my Galaxy Nexus and the three iPhones that use it.

Basically a virtual version of the old paper calendar in the kitchen that has everyone's schedule.This article (http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2690)shows you how to do it. The keyword is "edit". Essentially, one of you creates a calendar and allows the other person to edit it. They subscribe to your calendar, then they can make changes.

I have a family of five, with the wife and daughter using iPhones, and me, my son, and other daughter on Android phones. Our family uses Google Calendar, and it works like a dream. Plus, with Google Calendar, you can also access it easily from any computer in the world with internet access. And like GMail, Google Calendar is wicked fast compared to slogging through Outlook. Getting Google Calendar all set up - and configuring it to share with other people - can be a bit complicated if you're unfamiliar with the process of virtual sharing, and cloud computing. But it is very well worth the investment, in my opinion.

I have a couple of points of advice for you. If it's just the two of you, it probably doesn't matter as much as it does to my family of five, but I urge you to consider setting things up so each person gets their own Calendar in Google. Especially now, when you're starting from scratch, it's the very best opportunity to get all squared away. The huge advantage of each person having their own calendar is that it gives you way more options for configuring how you want to see or not see other people's stuff when viewing your calendar. And with the right phone app, it's just a couple of click's to turn on or turn off viewing any particular calendar at any given time. For example, in addition to each person in our family having their own calendar, we also have a calendar for holidays, another for birthdays/anniversaries, another for our favorite teams sports schedules (please offer me your condolences that I grew up being a Bengals fan...it's so painful), etc. My middle daughter could care less about the Bengals schedule, so she just turns that one off on her phone. Now that my oldest daughter is in college, I turn off her calendar most of the time, because I don't need to see her class schedule. I turn it back on when needed to see when she's coming home for holidays, etc.

I also agree with the above poster that a key element to understand is whether to grant other people the right to simply "view" a calendar, or whether to grant them the right to "edit" or change a calendar. My wife and I have full edit ability on every calendar. My 14 yr old son, however, only has edit capability on his own calendar, but only gets "view" ability on most of the other calendars. Obviously I don't want him messing with my "work" calendar! However, he does like to be able to view my calendar, so he knows when I'm out of town, for example. I also share his calendar with my parents (my son's grandparents), so that they can see when he has sports games, since they love to attend all their grandkids sporting events. It's just so awesome when I find out that the game 2 weeks from now got moved from 9am to 11am, and I make the change in the calendar, and now I no longer have to worry about my elderly parents showing up 2 hours early on the other side of town! :)

Finally, I've used an app called CalenGoo (GOOgle CALENdar...get it?) for a long time now, and it has both iPhone and Android versions. On the iPhone in particular, the stock calendar weekly view and monthly views are nearly worthless. CalenGoo is highly customizable, including choosing font size for those of us who need cheater glasses to read anything. Because it is so customizable, it can appear daunting to the noobie. But once you get it all set up, it really is a beatiful app.

Hope this helps a little, and good luck.

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I set up a separate Google account for my family's shared calendar and gave everyone access to that. Works great on my Galaxy Nexus and the three iPhones that use it.

Same here. I have iCloud cal, my wife too and we both share a google account calendar.

I've just started using a lot of the extra google services like calendar, tasks, drive, etc... and I've had nothing but success with iPhone syncing. (I just started using GoTasks instead of the reminders app and I highly recommend it)

One other thing (sorry for going off topic) but Google recently got Chrome into the App Store and it's syncing features are really cool. You can even access tabs that are open on another computer also running chrome. Perhaps I'm way behind the times, but even as a somewhat experienced computer user, the instantaneous syncing is very impressive to me.