How do I sync Gmail contacts with my iMac's address book and my iPhone?

I enable the sync with Google inside the preferences of address book on snow leopard but I don't know how to set the time between the syncing and how to force to update. I added a new contact to gmail from the web browser now I eed this contact in the iPhone and on the iMac too.
Before Lion there was iSync which stay in the status bar and keep update my contacts every time I wanted, but now with Lion it's gone!

How do I do that?

Solution 1:

When I had Snow Leopard I had the Google address book sync enabled and I somehow managed to put a 'sync' icon in the menu bar.

If I remember correctly I added it from the "old" iSync application (unsuccessfully trying to sync with a Samsung phone).

Now in Lion I still have it and it allows me to manually force the update of my Google address book, but I can't find how to obtain it as the iSync app seems to have disappeared.

This article here describes the situation of iSync in more details