The inPhonite Migration: Contacts
Posted on | September 18, 2008 at 6:59 am | 5 Comments
As I’ve mentioned many times before, I’m in the process of trying to completely migrate off my Palm T|X PDA, which I use for everything in the world, to my iPhone. Carrying around two PDAs is no fun, even if one of them is a phone too.
One of the most important functions of a PDA is the contact list. The list of people/companies I know and their phone numbers and e-mail addresses are an essential part of both a phone and a PDA. It is vital that this data be synced with a computer (and/or website) and that the information is easy to access and change. On the Palm, this was easy. The contact list was maintained on both the PDA and hotsynced with the Palm desktop application. Everytime I docked the PDA with the PC, the contact list would sync up and changes made in one would be reflected in the other.
The contact list on the iPhone works in a similar fashion. In fact, there are a couple of different syncing options. You can sync with Yahoo Address Book, Windows Address Book, Google Contacts, or Microsoft Outlook. At the time I got the iPhone, I didn’t own Outlook and I didn’t have a Google gmail account. However, I did have a Yahoo account. I found out how to import the contacts from the PDA into the Yahoo Address Book by exporting them as a .csv file using the Palm desktop app and importing that file into Yahoo. The process was not perfect and took some fudging around. It lost my categories (”Personal”, “Business”, “Dad”, etc) and I had to redo those. It did not import the birthdays for some reason, even though there are birthday fields in both databases and a column for them in the .csv file. I found out later it was because Palm was exporting them in the YYYYMMDD format, while Yahoo was expecting them in the MM/DD/YYYY format. Once I changed the format of the dates in the .csv file, which was somewhat laborious, and re-imported the file, then it worked and the birthdays appeared. There was also a problem with apostrophes and ampersands having the explicit codes instead of the actual characters, so I had to replace those in the .csv file.
At some point after I bought the iPhone, I bought Microsoft Outlook 2007 in order to use it for contacts and calendar syncing. It’s the only way to sync calendar events with a Windows PC. I was also kind of thinking I would use it for my e-mail client at home, to replace Eudora. But I played around with it some and was not having as much success as I wanted to with the importing of data, and I didn’t like the way it acted as an e-mail client (too limited control of what stays on the server and when things get deleted from it). So I put it aside for awhile, not wanting to mess with it. Then I got a gmail account and switched most of my e-mailing to that. Gmail’s web client is good enough that I didn’t need a separate e-mail client like Eudora. The iPhone e-mail client also works very well for gmail.
Digression: After getting a gmail account, I also tried importing my contacts from the Palm into Google Contacts using the recommended .csv file method. I was hoping to then use Google Contacts for the iPhone syncing. That really didn’t work at all. Google’s contacts import is totally broken and is easily the worst thing I’ve ever seen from that company. The import instructions on their website are pretty vague, and don’t really work. No matter what, I couldn’t get street addresses to import. From the message boards, I could see other people are having the same problem and Google isn’t addressing it in any way. The most telling thing is that you can export a complete contact from Google Contacts, erase it, then re-import it, and some of the information will have been lost. That says something is really broken. So much for using Google Contacts.
So anyway, last weekend I finally fired up MS Outlook with the intention of using it for syncing contacts and calendar to the iPhone. (I’m saving the calendar adventures for a future post.) I decided to import from Yahoo Address Book instead of from Palm, since Yahoo had the most up-to-date info from the iPhone. Although, to be frank, I did so much importing, exporting, and erasing of data that I’m not exactly sure where the final data originated from. But it all seems to be correct, so whatever I did must’ve worked. I know I did have the same problem with the date formats in Outlook, so like with the Yahoo import, I did have to do some massaging of data in the .csv file. As part of the import, Outlook even added reminders in its calendar for birthdays in the contact list, so that was cool.
There was a moment of panic when switching the iPhone contacts from Yahoo to Outlook, and I had to hold my breath. But it actually worked for the most part. The custom labels I had for some phone types disappeared, and I had to reenter them from the iPhone because Outlook apparently doesn’t allow custom phone types (like “voice mail” or “work after hours”). However, once you put them in the iPhone and sync with Outlook, the custom labels remain custom in the iPhone even though they show up as “Other” in Outlook. That was pretty much the only problem I had.
Note: I didn’t consider syncing the iPhone contacts with Windows Address Book, since I wasn’t sure how to run it or get the contacts into it. Although at some point I was able to bring it up and the contacts were already there! I think it got them from Outlook or something. But it’s all too mysterious for me to rely on.
One thing I learned from this experience is that there really needs to be a universal format for importing contact information. I know there are things like the vCard file format (.vcf files) but not all applications and websites can handle them. There should at least be a standard .csv file format that they all use. There really isn’t a lot of contact info, so it shouldn’t be that hard. The same thing is needed for calendar event importing/exporting, but again, that’s a topic for another post.
Whew! One part of the migration down, many, many more to go!
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Having a lot of trouble with the website lately, including an intermittent lack of ability to post. Scary! Customer support at the webhost can’t find anything wrong. So if I miss a day, that’s what’s going on!
Update: Comments were accidentally not enabled on this post. That’s been fixed. Sorry!
Comments
5 Responses to “The inPhonite Migration: Contacts”
September 18th, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
> One thing I learned from this experience is that
> there really needs to be a universal format for importing contact information.
Hey, you’re right – why hasn’t anybody thought of this before? A new UNIVERSAL format, one we ALL can agree upon and every vendor can implement consistently! It would simplify everything.
Trust a programmer to spot the obvious, simple solution that everyone else has overlooked.
September 18th, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
My wife just bought an iTouch to replace her Palm Tungsten (which I had given her when I got a Treo). She spent a whole evening transferring her calendar to it. I’m not sure if she ever figured out how to do contacts.
September 18th, 2008 @ 11:35 pm
I found a site that syncs my google calendar with the iPhone wirelessly, so that’s become my primary calendar. I used yahoo to sync my contacts, too, even though gmail is my primary email program.
September 19th, 2008 @ 9:45 am
I found a site that syncs my google calendar with the iPhone wirelessly
What service is that?
September 19th, 2008 @ 11:29 am
I knew you’d ask, but I was typing on the iPhone and was too lazy to look in my system settings. It’s Nuevasync.com. At some point in the config, you lie and say it’s an Outlook calendar. I haven’t read your calendar syncing adventure yet today. Maybe this would have been a more appropriate comment for that post.