Saturday, 2 January 2010

Migrate PalmOs Contacts to Android (the beginning)

Hi,

I've just ordered my Motorola Milestone and hopefully it arrives soon :-)

My many Contact Details are probably the most important so I started looking into their migration in more detail.

I'm using a Palm Desktop software version 6.2.2 (and phone TREO 680), you can select the contacts you wish and export these as VCARD.

While Google can import VCARDS it ignores the photos! After a while I found mention of the "http://www.soocial.com/" site. At first it wouldn't work so I decided to create a single contact and export (backup) to my workstation and look at the binary in detail.

After examination of the file and a small amount of trial and error it appears that the issue is that this site doesn't like Windows files (CR+LF), so the carriage return needs to be stripped. A bit of error checking and handling wouldn't hurt....

There are probably easier ways but to strip the CRs I used my "filter$" program as it was handy. This command creates a text file (text.txt) containing the hex sequences:

filter$ -BinToTxt < AllContacts.vcf > Text.txt


Using a text editor (I used jedit) I simply replaced all "0D\n" with "" and then ran the opposite command to rebuild the binary vcard file (now in "unix" format):

filter$ -TxtToBin < Text.txt > AllContacts2.vcf


Because the upload can take a while I suggest a dry run on a small number of records to start with, at the end of the import a yellow message will appear for a milisecond or two before the "backup" page is displayed, so be sure to watch for it very carefully.


It took me a while to see the message but when it was originally failing it would say it imported "0" records, here is a more successful example:



After a quick check of the data it would appear to have migrated accross pretty well and with the pictures. I think the photos will probably look average on the android phone but its a starting point.

The next step will be to add a link to GMAIL but I haven't had time for this today.

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