The situation:
- one (allmost) dead phone (Sony Ericsson w880i) with all my contacts
- one working phone (Nokia 6300) with none of mine contacts
- not willing to install Nokia en Sony Ericsson bloatware PC Suite
- no Windows
How do I get all my contacts from the dead phone to my working phone? Well I can install some bloatware form Nokia and Sony Ericsson on my Windows partition. Then I must backup my W880i, save the contacts in some obscure format. Change that format so that Nokia’s bloatware can read it, correct all the things that go unrecognized by that brilliant crapware and load it in the working phone. But I just don’t do that because:
- I must leave Ubuntu and restart in Windows;
- I’m not able to work for some hours in the software I like;
- I don’t like to install some crappy software that I wil never use again and will begging every startup for auto-updates and uses some 30 megabytes each on my precious ram;
- I don’t like to restart for every software install Windows does…
- I don’t want to backup my data in some obscure format
There is a solution for this problem. Wammu is a multi platform (win, mac, linux) opensource phonemanger that will work on most phones. Installation can be done with windows binaries, Debian packages, ubuntu apt repositories and RPM packages. Just make your choice here. After installation you can run the phone wizard that will search automatically for a phone on a (choosen) connection (USB, Irda, Bluetooth or serial). After recognition save that connection and start working, simple as that. Wammu will retrieve calendars, messages, call data, contacts and todos. You can save the data in various formats and even export messages to an email account. The interface is straight forward, but works and nothing more. You can edit contacts, calendars, todos, reply to messages, initiate a call to a contact.
If you want to sync to your email client, look at MultSync, Wammu doesn’t do that. But there’s more where Wammu came from:
- Gammu, a command line tool for controlling you phone
- libGammu, an API for accessing the Gammu library
- Gammu SMSD, a deamon that watch for incoming SMS and stores the in a database and for automating sending of SMS, use ith with Kalkun to control it with a browser
- Python Gammu, for use with Python