Synchronization

David Pottage david at electric-spoon.com
Fri Apr 11 17:25:24 CEST 2008


On Fri, April 11, 2008 3:57 pm, Joe Pfeiffer wrote:

> ramsesoriginal writes:
>
>> [snip] ... I am speaking about the synchronization between the phone
>> and other devise, could it be PC, a MAC, another phone, or even just
>> Google calendar. Which way of synchronization has been chose? Which
>> standards? Are there some "branded" or at least "recommended"
>> clients? _What_ can be synchronized: contacts? calendar? rss feeds?
>> GPS data? files?
>
> I've synced anything I've wanted to (going to/from a linux box) using
> 'rsync -auv'

I don't think ramsesoriginal was asking about syncing the filesystem
which you would sync with rsync, but about synchronizing his address
book (contacts) calendar etc.

In general the solution is to use SyncML, which is an open standard for
synchronization between phones, desktop computers, and internet sync
servers. It can use a variety of transports including bluetooth and
TCP/IP, and works by exchanging vCard files, for contacts, and similar
vCal etc files for calendar events and the like. It should be fairly
easy to port a sync client or server to Open Moko.

I have done some experimenting with syncing my Nokia phone with my
Linux desktop. The syncing part went fairly well, the problem was that
Kontact would not play nice as a sync target, so I was only able to
sync the contacts DB on my phone with a directory full of vCard files
on my Linux box, rather than with my groupware client which is what I
was really trying to achieve. Proper sync support is on the roadmap for
the next version of Kontact, so everything should work properly fairly
soon. I am eagerly awaiting the next Ubuntu release in order to give
that a try.

Another exciting possibly is that seeing as the OpenMoko phone is a
full Linux computer it could be used as a Sync server, making it
possible to sync with another cellphone without the need for a normal
computer. If we could have that as a standard feature on the consumer
version of the Freerunner it would be very cool.

-- 
David Pottage

Error compiling committee.c To many arguments to function.






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