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July 10, 2006

Palm to Phone - the end of an era

I've been using a Palm 3c for about 5 years now, and it's been a really useful little machine. Lately though I've found that I'm using pretty much only as an address book so I find myself with the Palm in one hand and the phone in the other, typing in the number from the Palm to dial on the phone. This is clearly insane behaviour: the phone has a perfectly good address book, but I've been holding onto the Palm for some reason.

Anyway, once I looked into what it would take to move the data across, it wasn't too hard. Fiddly, yes, but not difficult. With the thought that there might be someone else out there who needs to move from Palm to Sony Ericsson mobile, here's what I did:

  • Export all addresses from the Palm desktop app as vCard format. I exported them a category at a time, because I thought I might not want to put all of them onto the phone.
  • Just to be on the safe side, I also exported everything as CSV, and since I was going to stop using the Palm, exported all my memos too. I haven't thought of a good way to import them to the phone yet, but I don't use them that much, so it may not matter.
  • Install the Sony Ericsson phone sync application for Windows. For address purposes, it syncs with Outlook (which I don't use), or the Windows Address Book, which I didn't realise existed. If you are like me, just go to Start: Run... and type "wab.exe" in there.
  • Now you have to import the vCard files. Before you start though, if you have addresses you don't want to sync to the phone, you can create either a separate folder, or a separate identity and import them to there. When you set up the sync it asks which identity and folder you want to use, so you can exclude rarely used stuff that way.
  • If you exported separate categories, you can create groups in WAB to import them into. Select the group you want before you start importing, and all the imported vCards will be added to that group.

When you import, for some reason WAB makes you press enter for each new card. Very annoying, but unless you have thousands of entries, not a huge problem. I also found that I couldn't import multiple cards with the same person's name. If that's a problem for you I suggest you disambiguate the names either in the Palm desktop, or by just editing the vCard file - it's plain text.

Now sync the phone with WAB and you're done.

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Posted by MFreestone at July 10, 2006 10:33 PM