Reviewing the O2 XDA2, part 2
by Volker Weber
[continued from part 1]
After I was able to sync the Palm address book into the XDA via XTNDConnect PC, an unpleasant surprise was waiting in the wings.
I have to go back to a discussion about two years ago to explain the source of the problem. While I write my phone numbers with the pattern +country-area-number (+49-6151-25631) Ute has decided she would rather like a combination of just extensions for people in the office, 0area/number (06151/25631), +country/area/number (+49/6151/25631) and few other creative patterns. There is actually one that I still don't get, where the number starts with an asterisk. We had a discussion about this but eventually I let her have it her way because I thought it was rather cosmetic. It now turned out that it was not.
The XDA does not understand numbers with a slash inside. It cuts them off at the first occurance. So after Ute collected a 1000+ business cards inside her Tungsten, they all turned out to be pretty useless inside the XDA. Since neither the phone nor the desktop have a bulk search and replace feature she was stuck.
I deciced I wanted to do this in a text file so I exported the address book to vCard which preserves the connection type like cell, home, office even if you have more than one each. The other choices would have been CSV and tab delimited. After some creative pattern replacement with a text editor the vCard file was ready to be re-imported. I tried a number of times but the Palm desktop just blew memory through the roof. Something was wrong inside this file. After a lot of guessing I found the error. Palm desktop exports everything that has line breaks as type QUOTED-PRINTABLE but then forgets to escape inline equal-signs as =3D. Instead it just leaves the = in there. On import it then tries to find the ASCII value behind the equal sign and bombs. Now that was easily corrected once I knew what was going on.
Next showstopper was the fact that the desktop does not import a vCard file containing 1000+ business cards in one batch. You need to split them up into smaller units. A lot smaller actually. I did not test this thoroughly but it is around one dozen cards per vCard only. It turns out that Outlook requires a single business card per file so vCardSplit to the rescue. It lets you split out the vCards.
Re-imported them and now the address book in the XDA is neat. Yes, this is going to cost her. :-)
While I was at it, I tried to fix XTNDConnect which would no longer sync tasks. After I switched the log to debug mode, the phone threw a message "BatchWrite error". A quick Google search revealed that this is being taken care of by a hard reset of the phone. Did that, and once again threw out all the O2 customizations that automagically install after a hard reset.
I hope that this is it for now. Did I mention that I don't like PocketPC? I guess I did.
Comments
Just on a side note: On my mobile phone I too store quite a few phone numbers with a leading asterisk. To be precise, the whole sequence is *31# and I'm pretty sure you know what this is good for.
I would have recognized those. It turns out that the numbers I was talking about are shortcuts for her PBX in the office.
