When I switched to a Mac, I couldn’t find any calendaring system I liked, so I moved over to Google Calendar (or, as the guys in my office call it, GooGooCow). Took a while to get used to, and I still don’t understand why they don’t mark full-day events as actually “busy” data, but that’s neither here nor there. One ridiculously useful feature they introduced a few months ago was the ability to get SMS reminders. Now my $49 Samsung phone is in synch with my calendar (and it does video, all for much less than $499).
The combo was great, as 10 minutes before any appointment I’d get a text message on my phone. All was good in the world.
Until about 3 weeks ago. When it started getting unreliable.
Now, I get some alerts long after events are over. I get others just as events begin. Some I don’t get at all.
Which means I have to go look for a new solution, because in the world of alerts/reminders, unreliability is about as bad a problem as anything I could imagine. It’s weird too, seeing as how it’s (1) a very easy technology, and (2) Google usually scales well. Very very annoying. I think the only worse solution would be hiring Britney Spears as my administrative assistant. Yes, I went there.
I use a product for calendering called timebridge, it links with not only my calenders (yes, outlook from the borg) and google calender, Ical on my mac, but OTHER peoples calenders. I have my cell phone setup to get SMS messages via their email portal.
It’s likely a problem with your cell carrier. I’ve observed delay problems with my carrier (AT&T) when trying to send SMSs to another AT&T cell number. I get SMS notifications with Google Calendar and I’m still on AT&T and I haven’t noticed the delays be that bad — rather than 10 minutes before a meeting, the worst I’ve noticed in the past few weeks is a notification that was delayed by 3 minutes (ie 7 minutes ahead of my meeting). You might want to talk to other people using the same carrier as you? Do you use SMS otherwise and have you seen slowdowns in your non-Google SMSs?
Unfortunately SMS exists without QoS or SLA guarantees, so that the problem could lie with Google, their messaging aggregator, your carrier, or some combination thereof. All the connection points are highly prone to congestion-related delays and other issues. Long-story short – if you’re relying on receiving notifications to your phone for anything with SMS, expect reliability of about one 9, not five 9s…….
Good points, but it’s definitely only happening to Google SMS’s…