Apparently a cup of tea more bad than good in preventing the AH1N1 flu for my old phone which completely died (drowned) as of the procedure. In conclusion I had to choose fast and I did choose the best of the worst which was the single phone with no opening parts, relatively squared buttons and almost free for my operator. Since I see the phone as a basic tool which does not need much else than the ability to make a call this is most reasonable. I will probably break it, scratch it, drop it in dirt or on the stairs so I really don’t need another expensive gadget to take care of. The result was the C510 which I hopped to work in Linux (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmik Koala) as good as it’s predecessor. Here is a short check list:

  • bluetooth – worked instantly, I was able to transfer files, it even works as a remove control for my desktop which is quite cool
  • mass storage – works but I will probably never use it since it switches the phone functions off and I see no point in buying the proprietary M2 card (why not using micro SD which is more spread and I already have in my gps, camera and usb stick?)
  • usb cable – also worked
  • syncronization – BUMP!

I was keeping a backup copy of the contacts in my old phone using wammu (since multisync seems deprecated and I’ve tried the new version using opensync with my old phone with not much success) which is a very basic .vcf file with all contact information. I thought it will be equally simple to restore it. It was not. Apparently there are some problems with the protocol. Obex does not work with gammy (wammu) and using the AT protocol does not manage to sync the entries. Not even editing the entries on the phone does not work properly as the entries are left void in the phone and thus are duplicated.

I spent about 2-3 hours doing various changes in the .vcf files, working with the windows version of the backup which is in fact an archive with a .vcf file instead and managed finally to import the entries in a very complicated way by creating a backup in windows, editing the backup in linux and replacing the contacts.vcf in the archive with the backup I had. I then edited the .vcf to remove tags not understood by the pc suite and finally restored this modified file on the phone. I was pretty sad to see all this.

  • backup – this works in wammu so I will probably be able to backup the contacts for my next phone :)