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Cell Phone Syncing w/ Your PC or PDA?
IPSection asks: "I have been looking for a way to sync my PDA or Outlook to my cell phone (a Panasonic EBTX210). The serial data cable didn't come with any software (of course) and the only commercial solution I see is software called FoneSynch from Paragon Software (Windows only). Is there any free/shareware software for Windows/Linux that allows this functionality? Come on all you cell phone users - don't tell me you type in all of those numbers manually?" We've handled this question in a couple of earlier articles before, however there doesn't seem to be an all-in-one utility that once can use to extract your messages/address-book from your phone (or to allow you to set your phone from your PIM, for example). Many utilities focus on a specific line of phones (like Gnokii, which only works on Nokia phones) and others only work if your phone supports GSM or CPDP. If no all-in-one solution exists, what utilities have you found useful in keeping it all together?
I have been looking for a way to sync my PDA or Outlook to my cell phone...for Windows/Linux
If you are syncing up to outlook, your talking about a windows-only need.
Your PDA might be another thing, but if its outlook you are worried about, then you aren't asking the right question...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
(the poster mentioned something called Outlook, too: what's that?)
Buy your phone. When you call someone, look up their number in your PDA, then save it after dialing them. When someone calls you, save their number from the caller ID record. When someone changes their number, just change it on both the phone and PDA.
I've had both a Palm and a cell phone for about five years, and the above method has worked incredibly well for me, even with many of my friends moving around all the time due to graduating from college, getting laid off, and so on. The point is, 10, 20, even 30 digits of fairly static information just isn't that hard to keep in sync manually.
I've yet to find a good software solution that saves me more time than it wastes through lost data.
The key improvement they made over previous phones seems to be implementing vCard standard for contacts - every name on my phone can have up to four numbers assigned, as well as an email address and postal address.
vCard (and the successor iCard) allows some intelligence when sending data between different systems - rather than relying on hard-coded rules such as "take the first number only," it can extract all X numbers when the receiving system supports them, or only the most important number. For example, you may decide that the home phone number is the "primary" way to reach a contact, and set that as the one which should be transferred to a system which only supports one number.
FWIW, the T39 also comes with a really slick calendar. The calendar uses the vCal standard, so depending on how obscure the transport protocol is, it should be pretty easy for someone to grab the data from the phone via serial/IR/BlueTooth and sync it with a Linux app which supports vCard/vCal.
I've used Phonefile and it works really well. You take the SIM card out of your phone, put it in a floppy disk type thing and bung it into your disk drive.
Works a treat on Windoze. Not sure about Linux support though.
Oh, and it's not free but it means you won't have to worry if you change your phone / PDA / underpants