Sync Your Mobile while Saying Bye-Bye to MS Outlook

I just bought myself a Samsung Wave mobile, a stunningly beautiful phone with engineering that’s even more delightful. I had my wallet out of my pocket, seconds away from buying a Nokia E72, when I spotted the Samsung Wave. Wallet back in my pocket, went home to research if the Wave is as promising as it looks, or should I look for a third option. First stop, the reliable review-aggregator website alatest.com that showed both the Nokia E72 and the Wave were equally matched. Next stop, YouTube, where I checked reviews and hands-on demos by geeks and reviewers. Then I went through the official website, and then scoured through the Samsung Apps website to check for available software for the smartphone: samsungapps.com. The underlying platform, called Bada, is indeed open-source and totally rocks.

Wave Goodbye to Nokia

My only worry though, was how to transfer my contacts and calendar from my old and battered Nokia E61i, to the new Wave. For the record, I use Ubuntu Linux 9.04 on my MacBookPro laptop, which also has Mac OS X installed separately on the hard-disk. No Microsoft Windows on my machine. The Wave ships with a software called ‘Kiet’ that syncs contacts between the mobile and MS Outlook which obviously only runs under Windows. Digging deeper I discovered FoneSync, a Euro 19.95 utility from Nova Software that syncs the Wave with the address book and the calendar of Mac OS X. A few users’ comments elsewhere on the web alluded to some bugs and issues with it. Hmmm. No support or software or hack for Ubuntu Linux users. Time to shift to the cloud.

First, I used a free plug-in for iSync under Mac OS X, that syncs contacts and calendars between the Nokia E61i and the Mac OS X. Once I got the data into my laptop, I then opened the Address Book of the Mac, and exported all my contacts into a single file, once as a *.abbu file, and again as a *.vcf file which is a vCard file. Similarly, I exported all my calendar events as an *.icf file.

Booted into Ubuntu Linux and imported these into Evolution, which is a free, muft-and-mukt alternative to MS Outlook for Linux users. Now I could happily deposit the E61i in the new ‘ecology-recycle’ bins dotting every good mobile-store in Delhi. If you have old mobile power-adaptors and phones, please do consider depositing them here rather than throw them away with regular trash. Anyways, back to the cloud-sync.

I then opened my Gmail account, clicked on the ‘Contacts’ link in the left-pane, and then clicked on ‘Import…’ to pull in all my contacts into Gmail. Similarly, imported all my calender-events into Gmail’s Calendar. So now, apart from backups on my Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux partitions, I also have my mobile data backed up in the cloud. I can connect into it from anywhere and sync any of my devices whenever I wish.

Finally, on the Samsung Wave, here are the steps to follow:

1. Press the main-menu button to display all your software and applications.

2. Press the ‘My Accounts’ icon.

3. Press [Exchange ActiveSync]

4. Type your email ID “xyz@gmail.com”

5. User name will appear as “xyz”

6. Type your password

7. DO NOT enter anything in domain field.

8. Press [Done] and let it process

9. Type “m.google.com” for server URL

10. Enable “Use SSL”

11. Press [Set]

12. There you go, select anything which you want to sync.

I’ve compiled these steps from the helpful info provided here: http://www.google.td/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=1b80c29b961dfa61&hl=en
This obviously assumes you’ve got internet-access activated on your mobile-account, or else have access via Wi-Fi.
Cleverly enough, the Samsung Wave links multiple records of the same person into one consolidated entry in the phone’s address book.
Plus, for the first time, I can see just how hyper-connected I’ve become: click on a contact’s name and view all calls, sms-messages, facebook messages, tweets, direct-messages on twitter, emails, and IM chats, in just one place.
The Samsung Wave GT S8500 is a great phone. I especially love it’s voice-quality and ability to hold on to weak signals. My ears feel better since I’ve switched. And of course, the touch-screen experience on a vibrant AMOLED screen is sensational. It’s 5 MP camera, and HD-Video capture is impressive. A built-in video-edit software can also add captions to video-segments, and an optional cable outputs to a TV. Everyone, from little children, grandmas, Blackberry-enthusiasts, iPhone-users, to uber-geeks I’ve shown the phone, appreciates the beauty and design of this phone. The only thing that beats it currently, is the Samsung Galaxy, and the newer and newer models of top-end Android smartphones, which of course, cost a great deal more.
[ends]

17 thoughts on “Sync Your Mobile while Saying Bye-Bye to MS Outlook”

  1. Hi

    I bought a new Samsung Wave and synchronizing with Gmail works fine. From Gmail calendar to the phone. BUT not vice versa. have you got a solution for this?

    Brgds
    Harry

  2. Hi. Does this mean you no longer use mobile me account for calander and mail but have switched entirely to Google? or does it push your me.com mail and calendar to the google cloud. I am in a real quandry here which phone as a mac user to get, dont want expense of iPhone, I have both me.com and google accounts and have already exported contacts etc from contacts on mac up to gmail. Your post is very informative. I have used the nova media sync with my current tocco lite, and it is very buggy, it has wiped out calendar info more than once, and sometimes just misses events out randomly, and it cos £16.00? thanks for any help.
    Andy

  3. Harry, there seems to be a bug in ActiveSync, which reports
    “an internal error” whenever I try to sync from mobile to Gmail’s contacts. No response from any Samsung forum-posts I’ve posted to out there, yet. The quick-hack is to export new contacts as vcf and store them manually into gmail just to keep the list manually synced.
    Or to open each new contact, tap the menus to select ‘Save in my files’ and then later transfer them manually from the phone to the computer, and from the computer into gmail. Sucks, but am hoping someone soon creates a third-party software for bulk exporting and importing contacts, under ‘utilities’ at the samsung apps site.

  4. Andy, you can bypass me.com and totally work from within the google cloud. Yes, that is correct. The Samsung Wave works perfectly like this with my MacBookPro, and all contacts, tasks, and calendars, are synced, though the arrow is really a push-to-my-device for the moment. However, that is what is required in most cases. Am waiting for the minor bug-fix from Samsung (or is it Google?) so incremental changes affected via the Wave, can be rolled and synced into Google’s cloud of contacts and calendars as well.

  5. You’re right….its an excellent phone. I too researched the market but for much longer than you did, you were lucky. I am glad with the result of all this researching. The wave is an excellent phone for an excellent price! Just trying to be as patient as possible for bada 1.2.

  6. hello,this article is great,I found it on bing and I love it very much,I agree with what you have said, it help me a lot in decision,but I am not follw well with the last part,can you explain it for me ?I will appreciate your answer,and I will be back again!

  7. The phone is ok but the software is a piece of crap. Support is also awfull. Just take this:

    1. This, what they call it, Kies is a complete junk. Not only this application is huge and clumsy, it is getting worse version by version. An guess what – this is only needed for syncing bloody contacts and media!! Last version refused to sync my contacts at all – seems that Outlook 2010 is a problem now. I tried Kies on XP x86 and freshly installed W7 64 and can tell you that this is a sabotage, not a program.

    2. Stay away from so called firmware upgrades issued by Samsung. It simple does not work and chances that you will have to reset to firmware are 100%. Last time my phone stopped producing any sounds (system and ringtones) immediately after I upgraded the firmware using Kies. Dont these guys heard about Quality Assurance???

  8. Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point. You clearly know what youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your blog when you could be giving us something informative to read?

  9. If you’re only looking to be able to access your files from your mobile device, apps from CrashPlan, Mozy and Carbonite will do this for you. But the Dropbox app allows you to also upload

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