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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 a Motorola Timeport, and it came with TrueSync syncing software on CD-ROM. Needless to say, I loaded it immediately.
I wonder if other phones come with similar software in the box?
Both have infra red. Just enable infra red reception on your phone (mine is at "Menu/Infra Red") send out your address book from your Palm pilot, and point the two at each other.
:-)
Seriously this works. It uses vCard IIRC so the format is compatible between the two, and it just works. At least it did between my Nokia 8210 and my Palm V.
Oh, you don't have infra red??? Sorry, maybe someone else will answer
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
For Nokia phones (certain popular models only) there is a great free add-in for Outlook 2000 (or XP) that seamlessly synch's your contacts and calendar entries.
It's at http://www.snowvalley.com/nomad/.
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!
I've noticed that windows millenium (gag) comes with some sort of phonesync software.
My Nokia 8290 can get information off of my Palm III through its IR port. There're a few problems, though. First, only the last name seems to get transferred. Second, it only grabs the first phone number of the address record. Finally, you have to transfer them one at a time (as far as I can tell). It got to be a problem enough that I don't quite use it that often anymore.
Quite a few of the GSM phones have built in or add on infrared ports, and there are lots of Palm / PocketPC tools to talk to them using this interface.
Try running a search for "phone" on Palmgear.com. You can sync the phone numbers, and also compose ringtones and SMS messages on your PDA then upload them to the phone.
(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.
TrueSync software allows you to sync your cellphone with a PDA or a Yahoo calendar/address book account.
TrueSync is a windows program, but you can obviously read yahoo on your Unix box.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Ive been using my nokia 8290 and my visor deluxe to connect to the net for the last few months. I dont need to use a serial cable because the visor and the phone connect via infared. So i can /. on the go or do whatever..
Here is debian.org on my visor. Im using palmscape for browsing.
if you have a 8290 and a visor deluxe, somebody wrote a guide on howto get them to work together.
Keep your eyes open for SyncML phones like the Ericsson T39. Looks like a pretty cool standard and fairly open...
you look for the pdas and the phones documentations, then you buy the right combination.
I enjoyed some time Revo + S25 (siemens).
The S25 is one of the 4 model specially validated to work with the revo (with a motorola and 2 nokia).
Perhaps it's too much an european solution for you, but it had good Outlook sync for the Revo, and IR sync of phone number with phone.
Now, I broke the screen of the revo, reverted to palm, and want to change my phone (the battery begin to be old, and the phone stay on only 3 days;).
Further more, I don't know if choosinbg some psion pda is a good bet on the future.
It depends of your usage, and of your previsible usage, but I consider a phone is kept max 2 years, and a pda max 3 years. So, choose today some PDA you want to still have when you change phone, and then, choose a compatible phone.
KDE has a kdepim-cellphone set of tools. I, unfortuantely, don't have a cellphone smart enough to use it so I didn't install it. Here's the rpm package info though:
rpm -qip kdepim-cellphone-2.2-1.i386.rpm
[Stuff deleted to get around the slashdot lameness filter] BR>
Packager : Red Hat, Inc.
URL : http://www.kde.org
Summary : KDE support for synchronizing data with cellphones.
Description :
KDE support for synchronizing data with cellphones.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
I use a Kyocera Smartphone combination cell phone and palm pilot, and love it. I only carry one device instead of two, and can use all of the Palm tools (e.g. jpilot and the like) to edit the data for both the phone and the palm.
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:
I connected to the phone with kermit and made sure it was ready to talk, and then ran something like
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.
http://www.starfish.com/private/yahoo/yahoo_ov.htm l
I use it to synchronize: Outlook (yeah, yeah, yeah, it's for work), Pilot, Yahoo Calendar, Yahoo address book and StarTAC phone. It's Win32 but has lots and lots of available modules.
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.
Just wait a month and get samsung's I300 palm phone, then you won't need to sync your phone & pda because they'll be the same, and since it's palm, it will sync with linux. Kyocera also has a palm phone which is dual mode (the samsung is PCS only).
The reason why there is no size fits all solution is that all phones support different standards. You have to find the best fit for your particular phone (if one even exists). The situation will get better in the next year or 2 when all phones will start supporting syncML which is a standard for syncing data (Calender (vCal) and address book (vCard) info only at the moment).
;)
So you first need to look for a product that will either sync Outlook -> Phone or Palm -> Phone and another product that supports Palm -> Outlook. So lets look at these one by one...
Outlook -> Phone: I think there are a couple of options here. All products at the moment sync via a serail cradle or IR port. Look on the web for your phone and sync software, i'm sure you find something.
Palm -> Phone: Again a couple of options but it depends on your phone, note my experience with this software has been a little flaky. Make sure you have a backup of your palm first as you could end up with a bunch of dups. I tend not to use this software but just beam contacts to my phone aas I need them (I have a Nokia 7110 which supports multiple phone numbers per entry). The problem is getting those drunken 'girl at bar' numbers back to my PDA, I end up just trping them in the next morning if can remeber her name...
Palm -> Outlook: Well all PDA's seem to sync with outlook out of the box but if you want some decent software the go with some like Intellisync (plug, plug...) It offers better conflict resolution, filtering and more advanced features.
Those are your options right now. In the next year or 2 you will have true multi point sync up to a central web store where you can keep all devices in sync, filtered, conflicts resolved and applications on whatever device you happen to be carrying....but thats still a couple of years off before it gets really useful.
/b
[Please type your sig here.]
My silly little perl script, "SAMBRU" (SAMsung Backup and Restore Utility) can pull data out of a samsung 6100/8500 Sprint PCS phone, and save it in vcard format, which can then be read into gnome-card, which can then be exported to your Pilot... I always wanted to write a palm app to do it directly, never got around to it.
I recently bought myself the Motorola Timeport 250 (Euro model), 3 band phone, only to find that the I-R capability was lousy. Not only is there no way to use the I-R port to beam numbers off, I have never been able to get it to successfully sync with my Handspring Visor or portable computer. A friend of mine has a Nokia phone and this will quite happily transfer phone numbers both ways between it and my Handspring Visor ( didn't try with my portable ). Given this I feel that Motorola still needs to work on its I-R capability.
Given this I am not going to dump my phone, because it still serves its purpose and I can put up with copying numbers by hand, at least for the moment. BTW the European GSM phones tend to look better than those that we get over in N. America and they also tend to be smaller.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If you've never seen one, it's a Springboard module that plugs into the back of a Handspring Visor (Palm Pilot clone), turning it into a GSM cell phone.
I got one last week. It's pretty nifty to be able to dial any phone # out of my visor address book. I haven't tried the wireless browser yet... but you can surf the web, even run a SSH on it from anywhere you can get your PCS signal.
-dc
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
Along the same lines, has anybody ever seen software that will sync a cellphone to a Mac? It will definitely influence my next cellphone purchase.
- j
All your good old GSM cell phones speaks a rather hefty AT command set. The modem manual for the R320 (early wap phone) at Ericsson's developer area is over 300 pages long. You can basically explore the phone's entire funtionality through the command set.
Connect to your phone through a terminal emulator using either the IR COM port or a serial cable and COM1. Do the AT dance.
BTW:
You can shorten your connect time for a PPP based GSM data channel from 30 to 15 seconds by using an ISDN modem. This will not improve your bandwidth, only shorten the link setup time.
Do
AT+CBST=71,0,1
before you dial your ISDN modem.
Some networks can only hook up to an ISDN modem that is set to the older V1.10 standard. Check your local manual.
The time from ATDxxx to CONNECT is usually 4 seconds. The rest of the connect time is PPP negotiation stuff.
For what it's worth.
Now, in fact I don't really sync them as I only keep a few numbers on my phone, and mostly use the psion to dial a land line.
But, there is great software called PhoneManPro that you can use to manipulate the phone from the Psion. Not only can you edit the phone book, (or import from CSV etc) but it also lets you send SMS messages, edit the ringtones, etc. all of which is about 2000% easier with a Psion 5 keyboard!
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
From freshmeat:
GSMLIB is a library to access GSM mobile phones through GSM modems. Features include: modification of phonebooks stored in the mobile phone or on the SIM card, reading and writing of SMS messages stored in the mobile phone, sending and reception of SMS messages.
Get it at http://freshmeat.net/projects/gsmlib/.
-Pat
um, dunno if it has a version on *nix, but it syncs my Motorola Startac with my Sony Clie and my Outlook/Exchange. Also can sync a variety of other devices as well... runs through serial, IR, or USB.
I have all 3. With the Timeport came with software called 'truesync' which actually allows me to sync all three. The timeport and clie connect up through usb (actually, timeport is serial w/ serial-to-usb converter). I then just hit the sync button and it all syncs up. Pretty nifty.
This is a feature I've always wanted... it's pure convenience. Sadly, though, it doesn't work under anything not windows... especially since the Clie doesn't have linux usb support quite yet. In any case, though, this is the best solution to the business traveler who needs to have numbers handy no matter what device (s)he has in front of him/her.
I don't know how long they're going to remain in business, but check out Fusion One. They have an online program meant to keep different mobile devices synchronized.
Good luck!
QAExpress: Solid bug tracking for you. Graphs and reports for your PHB.
The exact formats of different messages can be found in the document stdma_sm.pdf which you can download from the nokia smart messaging page. To actually download anything you need to give them an e-mail address and click on a disclaimer, so I can't link directly to the file. There are also a lot of other very good documents on that page.
For the purpose of providing some sort of answer to your question, the thing that you are most likely to want to do is send names and numbers from your PC to your phone. The format used is basically equivalent to vCard with ASCII armor and some extra headers. Your business card messages will start with the header segment
//SCKLwwww23F4xxyyzz //SCKL signals the beginning of Smart Messaging data, wwww signals the origination port (doesn't matter what you use as long as it's a 4 digit hex number and it's the same for all parts of your message), 23F4 is the port on which the vCard receiver listens, xx is a reference number which must be common to all parts of your message, yy is the total number of parts in the message and zz is the sequence number.
where
As an example we'll say that you want to send to your phone a number for somone named AAA whose number is 1234567890. The vCard will look like this:1 3233343536373839300D0A454E443A56434152440D0A
//SCKL23F423F4990201 424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A31
BEGIN:VCARD
N:AAA
TEL:1234567890
END:VCARD
This has to be converted to ASCIIhex to be sent to the phone, to the vCard data turns into:
424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A3
Now we can split this into two separate SMS messages so that it can be sent to the phone. They're going to look like this:
//SCKL23F423F4990202 3233343536373839300D0A454E443A56434152440D0A
Given this information it should be pretty trivial to write an application which sends this data to your phone's e-mail address, but I have yet to see a decent one for either Windows or Linux. Maybe I'll write one later if I get to feeling bored.
In other nifty fun with SMS you might want to look at the shell script I wrote which sends the subject and from lines of incoming e-mail to your phone via a web to SMS gateway.
I'm not sure how well I've answered the poster's question, but I hope that I've added a little bit of information that someone finds interesting.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
You could always look into the solution I found - a Visorphone. Not right for everyone, especially people who do road trips or otherwise get out of range for the digital service the VP supports, but it sure beats doing any work getting phone numbers between your cell phone and your PDA.
--Matthew