I recently switched from my Palm Treo 680 to a Nokia e71. It was a painful departure from a decade with Palm, but the phone is now old, and the battery life has begun to become a major issue during the normal working day.
The e71 has some great features over the Palm, but a couple of things I’ll definitely miss are the touch screen and the keyboard!
A hurdle that I came across during migration was my contacts. There didn’t seem to be a simple way to synchronise the two devices without hacking about with Outlook and some other garbage inbetween. I don’t run Windows, and so I don’t have Outlook. Short of spending ages trying to knock together a synchronisation profile in Ubuntu for both devices, I tried to find an easier way. It turns out, there is a very simple way that doesn’t seem to be well documented.
The process works like this:
- On the Palm Treo 680, go to your contacts menu, and under the category “All” – press the “Menu” button (bottom right key on the keyboard)
- Click “Send Category”
- Select “Email” or “Chatter”, or some other file transfer method that allows you to get the file to your Desktop
- You will then have a file called “All.vcf” on your desktop, this file now needs to be processed through my PHP vCardSplitter script. You can do this using PHP5-CLI, or if you don’t have this on your computer, then drop me a comment below to get in touch, and I’ll split the files for you
- Once your files are split, you then need to connect your Nokia phone to your computer in “Mass Storage Mode” and copy all the split VCF files onto the phone under the folder “/Other/Contacts”
- Safely disconnect your phone from the computer
- On the phone, go to the Contacts menu, click the Options button and select “Copy > From Memory Card”
- It will then begin copying all your contacts in their full glory to your phone! I had about 1500 contacts to copy across, and I started it just before I started writing this post, and it still isn’t done… (it takes a while)
You’re done! I don’t think the categories that were saved on the Palm are copied across, but at least you now have all your contacts, and all of their full vCard information with them. So this should have copied across email addresses, multiple phone numbers, addresses, etc.
As above – if you can’t execute PHP scripts on your own, then drop me a comment, and I’ll sort you out with a split up file and its outputs. There is a spam trapper running on my comments box below, so make sure you have JavaScript turned on when viewing this page!
Do you have an easier way to do this? If so, please let me know and I’ll link to your method from this post!!
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