chewearn's blog

Previously, I mentioned about switching from a Treo650 to a Nokia N95. The data migration from one phone to the other involved two main steps. First, move the data from Treo650 to a PC (I am using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04). Second, move the data from the PC to Nokia N95. In this post, I will explain the second part.

What you need

1. Ubuntu Hardy PC with one USB port
2. Nokia N95 8GB
3. Bluetooth USB device

Step 1: Bluetooth pairing of phone to PC

I wrote about this process in a previous post here.

Step 2: Fix Evolution’s contacts and calendar databases

I was syncing the contacts and calendar databases only. Originally, the source data was transferred from a Treo650 to Evolution. There are a few things you would need to fix before making the sync to Nokia N95.

1. Line feed character will be converted to “\n” in Nokia N95.

Treo650 was able to accept line feed character in the address field. I have some addresses which were multilines, delimited by the line feed character. When these are transferred to the Nokia N95, it showed up as “\n”. E.g.

Block 19 Street One
Avenue Park

Turned into

Block 19 Street One\nAvenue Park

Therefore, I have to manually change it to

Block 19 Street One, Avenue Park

2. Contact’s street field limited to 50 characters in Nokia N95.

Additional characters beyond the 50 characters limit are dropped. I have to shorten some address fields to keep to the limit. E.g. “Avenue” shortened to “Ave”, “Street” shortened to “St”, etc. You get the idea.

3. Calendar’s event field limited to 80 characters in Nokia N95.

Same problem, similar workaround as above.

4. Timeless events were not synced.

I have a couple of events that were timeless. I.e. they occurred in specific dates, but there is no time assigned to the event. For instance, Christmas occurred in 25th December, but it was not assigned 9am or 10am. For these events, I manually added them to the Nokia N95 calendar afterwards.

5. Alarm info was not synced.

All alarms associated to events were lost in the sync. Again, I have to recreate the alarm in the Nokia N95 calendar afterwards.

Step 3: Follow the ubuntuforums howto

The HOWTO: Sync Evolution with Nokia N95 via Bluetooth on Ubuntu Gutsy has an excellent detailed explanation, and it would be extraneous for me to repeat them. Personally, I am using the GUI method.

One noteworthy thing to mention was the initial sync took a couple of minutes when transferring about two hundred data items for my set-up. During this process, there was no progress indicator, so it appeared as if the process was frozen. But it was actually not so. Just be patient and wait for it to complete.

Caution

Be sure to check every data item in the Nokia N95 afterwards. Make sure all important info was properly transferred.