Rogers Blackberry with Google Sync and Blackberry Internet Service Synchronization

Watch out for an issue we just encountered today with Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) on Rogers with a Blackberry Bold running Blackberry OS 5.0:

• if you change your price plan with Rogers it will reset your BIS settings and turn on Sync Contacts, and Sync Calendar via BIS automatically.  This will cause massive duplication of Google Calendar entries and corruption of address fields in Google Contacts if you also have Google Sync installed and running on your phone.  The difference between synching with BIS and Google Sync was discussed on a prior blog post here
• We still recommend using the Google Sync because it works better and faster than the BIS sync

The solution is to sign out of Google Sync before making changes to your account.  The next day review your BIS setup via the Email setup icon on your phone and make sure the Synchronization of calendar and contacts is turned off.  Then restart/login to Google Sync again.

Update April 19, 2011: We're seeing this issue much more frequently now across Rogers, Telus, and Bell.  They are upgrading their backend BIS systems so suddently Contact and Calendar sync can get turned on with zero warning causing corruption of Calendar and Contacts.  We hope that the cell phone companies will work with RIM to warn users before making the surprise upgrade.  As a result of this we strictly turn on the BIS Contact and Calendar Sync if supported by the phone.