New Phone, SyncML Hell

Yesterday my new phone, a Nokia 6230i, arrived. This morning I tried to use Multisync to restore the backup of the contacts I took trivially (via IrMC) from my old K700i.

Well, that wasn't trivial. The 6230i uses SyncML which is groovy and everything, but is also hell to configure. Has anyone actually made this work? Ideally I'd have the phone as the SyncML server so that I can start syncs from my laptop running Multisync, but the manual for the phone doesn't exactly make it obvious how I'm supposed to connect to a machine via something other than GPRS (I want to use Bluetooth of some sort).

Help!

10:15 Wednesday, 08 Mar 2006 [#] [computers] (8 comments)

Posted by Peter Robinson at Wed Mar 8 12:22:45 2006:
Ross, when I got my 6230i I used gnokii to upload my address book and everything. It worked really well. Not sure if multisync can use gnokii as a backend or not.
Posted by Barry Hawkins at Wed Mar 8 12:56:10 2006:
Ross, hi, I have gotten Bluetooth to work for Multisync with my Ericsson T610, although it's not using SyncML; however the Bluetooth connectivity is the same for the Ericsson plugin and SyncML IIRC.  I have a blog post that has some of my scripts and links to articles that helped me out, but I have not explicitly blogged about my Multisync setup (read woes) yet.  I should probably do that.  If you remember to use channel 11 in configuring your Bluetooth connectivity for Multisync, that can save you some frustration.  If I do blog about that, I will be sure to let you know.
Posted by frej at Wed Mar 8 15:34:21 2006:
I once tried with gnookii for syncing calenders with  evo and back.


Gave up...didn't bother. Syncing data is horrible :/.
Posted by Ross at Wed Mar 8 15:40:22 2006:
Gnokii is terrible for several reasons:

* the vCard parser is non-standard, so refuses to parse Evolution vCard files.  A little sed magic on the file fixed that
* the wrapper script kills the process after 30 seconds despite the complete copying of my contacts taking two minutes.

All sorted now, and gnokii is purged from my system again.  I'll wait a while until using OpenSync + SyncML doesn't involve building four libraries from SVN...
Posted by Wout at Thu Mar 9 10:00:33 2006:
Hi Ross,

I'll give you a hint on cell phone/ smart phone and linux: "It sucks".

I have a nokia n70, connecting it to the computerthrough bluetooth is easy. Sending and recieving files with obex is easy to. But doing anything thats really usefull is jst about impossible. I have no clue as to how I would get this to work.

I think this is a major problem in this day and age. Gadgets are a major thing right now. I use my mobile phone as an mp3 player but I have to use windows to get the files on it. That just sucks....
Posted by Russel at Mon Mar 13 13:44:24 2006:
Told you so.

You told me when I got my SE P900 all I had to do was use OpenSync/Multisync and SyncML and that it was easy.  I have been waiting patiently, lurking on the relevant mail lists for anyone to actually make any form of connection between Evolution and P900 actually work sensibly.  So far total failure.

As Wout says for connecting phone to computer Linux sucks.

I still refuse to use Windwoes, obviously. The upshot is that I have a phone and separately I have a computer. :-(
Posted by AJxn at Mon May 8 06:04:02 2006:
It isn't Linux or multisync that sucks. It's your Nokia. 
Work like a charm with my old Ericsson T610. I should upgrade to a newer thoug, but it works quite well still...
Posted by raboof at Fri Aug 11 20:53:25 2006:
After a little bit of tinkering, I could exchange information with this phone on Linux using gnokii. On Windows, things are still broken (the Nokia PC suite worked a few times, now it doesn't work anymore and I have no chance in finding out how to fix it...)

I'm now considering building gnokii for Windows.

Syncing this Nokia on linux may suck, but at least for me, it sucks even harder on Windows :/.

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