Importing contacts to Treo 680

Well, i thought this will be easy but it caused me some headache to figure out how to put all my contacts from my Sony Ericsson T610 to Treo 680.

Before Treo 680

I have been keeping all my phone book copy on my computer. Just for the record my comp is a mac. It was extremely easy to synchronize my old phone with the OS X built in Address Book using the built in iSync. I had an address book containing complex info like phone, address, email, web, birthday. My phone could only sync the phone, and email info. I had to find a way to put the address book from my computer to my Treo. 

Trying to use iSync

Palm devices are also iSync compatible and they can be synchronized this way but there is a small problem... and nobody is mentioning about that. I suspect Treo does not support unicode characters. I have the feeling it supports the ASCII character set and when it has to deal with unicode starts to behavior strangely.

In my case that's a tragedy. I have a lot of hungarian names in my address book. When tried to synchronize the address book did not get entirely to my Treo. Every sync attempt ended up in failure, with only a few records getting on the Treo. I suspect the records containing special characters like [ie: ő,ű] causing the failure.

So I gave up on the iSync possibility since it did not appear reliable enough.

Trying to export

Next choice was using the Palm desktop software for sync. But how to get those records from the Address Book software to Palm desktop software?

Well I chose the export to vCard option. This resulted in a long VCF file. This is a plain text file that can be opened with any text editor. 

Opened the VCF file with a text editor and manually made a find and replace for each character I thought being a potential source of problem. [ie: replaced ű with u, ő with o and so on]. It took me a while to finish that. Had to be very careful not to change the tab and line break formating of the file.

Importing to Palm desktop

After the preparations I have imported the VCF file into the Palm Desktop software. Everything looked almost right. But I noticed a few records being mixed up. Realized that I missed a few unicode characters to replace. Did the replace, imported again and everything worked like a charm.

Synchronizing to Treo

It was just a button push on the sync cable... It worked and I had the whole contact list on my Treo in a few seconds. I still do not like the Palm Desktop software as much I liked OS X Address Book but it will do as a backup utility.