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?

Comments

Use kermit

[JeffL]

I was looking around for something to allow me to manage the phone book in my Ericsson R280L. I tried Kandy, part of KDE, but it didn't work well enough to do what I wanted. I finally just converted my address book from my palm into text, copied the numbers I wanted into emacs and created a list that looks like:

at+cpbw=11,"18002224357",,"AAANational"
at+cpbw=12,"18882583741",,"AmericanExpress"

I connected to the phone with kermit and made sure it was ready to talk, and then ran something like

foreach i (`cat phonenumberlist`)
echo $i > /dev/ttyS0
sleep 1
end

The sleep 1 is important, because the phone couldn't take entries any faster. A friends Motorolla could connect over IR, but it needed sleep 5 after each entry.

Managing my phone list with emacs, sed, awk, and sort turned out to be much simpler than doing it with some click happy windows program I tried. I think it was TrueSync, or something that I got from Yahoo to synch my palm with Yahoo calendar. It claimed to be able to sync to my phone, but it only had two modes of operation, do nothing, and erase all numbers in the phone.