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

Easy!

[Matts]

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 :-)

Nokia 8290....

[Nexx]

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.

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.

Out of luck at the moment

[barnaclebarnes]

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

Smart Messaging

[lizrd]

If your phone supports smart messaging (Most newer ones do) you may be able to make some use of that. Smart Messaging was developed by Nokia, but it's being used by other phone makers as well. Guessing from the fact that you have a Panasonic EBTX210 phone you probably have service from some flavor of AT&T so you should be able to order text messaging service which you will need to take advantage of this.

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
where //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.

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:
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:
424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A31 3233343536373839300D0A454E443A56434152440D0A
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:
//SCKL23F423F4990201 424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A31
//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.