OT: contact-management hell (iPhone how-to)

[david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org (David Kramer)]

Rich Braun wrote:
> I have an iPhone languishing on my desk.  Why?  Because I've got my phone-book
> with my friends' details sitting on a Linux box in a MySQL table, and a
> separate out-of-sync listing embedded in my ancient Motorola V180.
> 
> At some point last year I wiped my PC's hard drive and more or less fully
> converted to a Linux desktop, so I no longer have a working installation of
> Outlook 98 which used to give me a very limited mechanism for updating the
> contact list.
> 
> The iPhone and pretty much every other vendor's notion of a contact manager
> (be it a PDA, cell phone, webmail account, sales-automation tool, whathaveyou)
> seems to be proprietary and patented to the hilt.
> 
> Having just seen "Food Inc." I'm of a mind to write my Congressman to stop the
> monopolistic madness of all these Fortune 500 companies which wield their
> lawyers and intellectual-property nonsense over the rest of us.
> 
> *However*, stepping back from the brink:  how do y'all manage *your* contact
> info?  Is there a sane way to keep your address book (defined as names, phone
> numbers and email addresses, maybe a few other fields) regularly copied
> (sync'ed may be too strong of a word) in either direction between a Linux box
> and an iPhone?

No.  There isn't.  At least not that I know.  I've had five or six
different PDA's over the years that you could somehow get your data off
of, and for every one it took major hackery to get the data from it to
something else.  Well, except for the best geek PDA ever, the Psion 5mx.
which had import and export functions.

My last PDA was a Palm T|X (the most powerful one they offered), and I
had to back up both my Palm and my desktop software before every sync,
because it was practically random whether they would merge correctly, or
the PDA would be empty, or the desktop would have every entry duplicated
several times...

Now I have a Windows Mobile phone that I also use as my PDA.  And I am
happy with it.  No more syncing problems.  Know why?  Because I don't
even try to sync.  I back up, but I never sync.

I tried sync-e and the 12 other projects it depends on to sync, and even
then only with Evoution, which I despise.  After easily five hours of
work getting everything installed and the laptop pinging my phone, I
tried to sync and it wiped out all the data on my phone.  Fully
expecting this, I had backed up first.  Oh, and I would get five or six
of the "your phone is connected" icons on the top panel, even when it
wasn't connected.  Crap, I tell you!

My wife is facing the same problem.  Her Palm is dying (touch screen).
She wants to move into the modern world, but Palm pretty much just makes
phones now, and she doesn't want a PDA phone.  She wants them as
separate devices.  Maybe an iTouch would suit her needs, but we'll never
know, because how do you get Palm data over to an iTouch?