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I use Google Calendar with an iPhone, syncing several calendars. My main calendar has default reminders set up so that if I create an event on the web, I get emails and SMS messages. When I create an event on the iPhone though, I don't get these default alerts.
Is there any way to configure the phone or the calendar so that, when I create an event on the phone, the default alerts work the same way they do if the event is created on the web?
No, the built-in Calendar application does not have a default alert setting.
However, third-party apps can do it (and access the same calendars). For example, Quick Event (found here) looks like what you want.
In the past, I have set default alerts for my Google Calendar via the web interface, and no alerts on my iPhone. When doing this, the alerts do not appear in the iPhone calendar app immediately. The alerts will be added server-side, and will appear when the iPhone re-syncs the calendar (usually within a couple of seconds in my experience).
One question, though. Is your Google Calendar account set up through Google Sync? When I tried using Google Sync to handle my calendars, I found that my alerts were not synced properly.
This doesn't solve your problem just yet, and it's possible there will be some wrinkle that will prevent it from doing so in the future, but when Apple releases iOS 5 and iCloud, supposedly all the events you set up on your phone will sync back to your mac immediately (I'm assuming you're using a Mac, which may be incorrect).
So, as roundabout as it is, it seems that if you start running iCloud in the near future, when you create a new event on your phone, what should happen is this iPhone > iCloud > Desktop > Google > alert to iPhone. This is obviously kind of unwieldy. For whatever its worth, I've been using Calvetica on the iPhone for a while, and you can specify a default alert in that.
