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Merging email and phone contacts for the iPhone

This has nothing to do with iPhone lawsuits but I have recently purchased my first iPhone (waited for: 3G, GPS, Apps, Exchange) and I went through quite an ordeal to merge my phone and email address books. If you don't own an iPhone you might be wondering why I went through this and the simple answer is the iPhone email interface. So without further ado, my merger story:

• BACKUP!! I failed to heed this critical tenant at one point and almost lost my entire address book.
  
  
  
  • For your iPhone contacts I recommend Funambol
  
  
  • For your email client there should be some built sort of export/backup util. Just make a copy (or two!) of your current address book


• First I Synced my old Nokia via bluetooth with my wife's mac because it just sticks all the contacts in the osx address book.


• Then I attempted to migrate the contacts into thunderbird. I was not able to find a fool proof way to do this. A To G will allow you to sync your contacts to google but it missed a lot of my phone numbers for some reason. From there I used zindus to get them into thunderbird. If I were to do it over again I would take the CSV file that A to G generates and manually edit it down to a much simpler CSV file. Then I would import it into thunderbird.


• Ok, so now you have a giant address book (in my case 500+) with lots of duplicates. One contact for the email address, one or more for the phone number(s).
  
  • Using the thunderbird addon Duplicate Contact Manager I went through and merged all of my contacts.
  • The tool could use some interface improvements but it is far easier than anything else I could find. The tool would not only let me choose which of the duplicate contacts to delete, but it also lets you copy data from one contact to the other. This makes merging the email contact and phone contact a breeze.


• BACKUP!!!! (this is the step I missed and it cost me many hours and almost my entire address book)


• I Deleted all of my contacts from gmail because the sync tool kept putting back duplicates that I wanted to deleted.


• I then went into Zindus in thunderbird (Tools -> Zindus), hit "RESET" (CRITICAL) and then hit "Sync"


• I already had my iPhone setup to sync contacts from google so I just plugged in my iPhone and viola! My contacts were merged.


• If you leave zindus in place then all 3 of your address books (iPhone, gmail, thunderbird) will be kept in sync goodness.

Website Idea: Contacts/address book merging tool. It would grab contacts from email clients, webmail clients, csv files, vcards and social networking sites. Then a combination of wizbang duplicate merger and user input (with lots of backup and undo functionality) would merge all the contacts together. Of course you would then need to be able to export all the contacts to a myriad of sources as well. Throw in an iPhone app and you have a pretty slick tool. Monetizing that tool though!? Not sure.

Apple settles visual voicemail lawsuit

Though apple (and AT&T) settled the lawsuit and will be forced to license the patents from Klausner Technology it means that other phone manufactures will be able to license it is well. Of course the other carriers will have to license and implement the technology before it becomes widespread but that shouldn't be too far off.

The financial terms of the settlement have not been disclosed but the original lawsuit was for $360 million.

sources: electricPig.com dbtechno.com

Supreme Court OKs Cellphone Unlocking Suit

While by no means the final say, this ruling by the supreme court is good news for those who want to fight the locking of cell phones to a particular carrier.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dashed a bid by T-Mobile and AT&T to stave off a class-action lawsuit challenging the carriers' policies against unlocking mobile phones.

The justices declined to review an October decision by the California Supreme Court that cleared the way for a lawsuit that attorneys claimed could represent "millions" of California customers.

Earlier this year Sprint and Verizon (CDMA Carriers) both agreed to give customers the unclock codes once they completed their contract. While this falls short of selling unlocked phones to begin with it's a step in the direction towards a user's ability do what he or she wants to a product they have purchased. In a similar move

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington listed cell phone unlocking as one of six new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

Which means that unlocking your cell phone is no longer a violation of the DMCA, though the language is not clear on whether this means that cell phone carriers are required to unlock them.
Source: wired.com

iPhone digital keyboard lawsuit

These are starting to get really old. In 2000 someone patented

"method of providing a user interface for receiving information from a user using a user immutable graphical keyboard linked to an input area, [...] invoking the graphical keyboard on a touch screen display to receive input from a user, and [...] maintaining the graphical keyboard on the touch screen display such that the user cannot move, resize, remove, or close the graphical keyboard through the user interface while the input area remains and requires input."

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Ok, pretty lame and obvious, but what makes this amusing is that the man holding the patent is a doctor who was recently fined $900,000 and sentenced to 51 months for defrauding the healthcare system in texas.

Source : AppleInsider

Inside the iPhone Gray Market

MSN has an interesting and fairly detailed article covering the history and direction of the iphone unlocking market. From the article:

In January, Walberg [owner of pdacable.com] found a cheap Turbo SIM knockoff sold by a Chinese supplier. He packages the device to create an altered SIM card and sells them for $44. His customers include London businessmen and retailers in Mexico, Brazil, and other locales. He's even getting calls from carriers that don't want to share their profits with Apple, as AT&T and others have agreed to do. That way, customers can come in with their iPhone, buy Walberg's device, and skirt Apple's exclusive provider. "I don't know if [these carriers] can legally encourage unlocking, but they're not going to discourage it," says Walberg. "This market will go on forever, because I don't think there's a way for Apple to stop us."

Patent reform anyone? Yet another iPhone lawsuit

Here we go again. File it under the "let's patent something that millions of users have been asking for" department the latest iPhone related lawsuit comes from little known Minerva of Los Angeles. The filed for the patent back in November and despite Apple's submission of prior art last week the patent office granted Minerva a patent for a device that has

mobile entertainment and communication device in a palm-held size housing (that) has a cellular or satellite telephone capable of wireless communication with the Internet and one or more replaceable memory card sockets for receiving a blank memory card for recording data directly from the Internet and, in particular, musical performances that then can be selectively reproduced by the device for the enjoyment of the user, including both audio and visual recordings and reproductions.

I don't know about the rest of you but I've been saying for years that I would like a device that combines my cell-phone with my i-pod and a hand held computer. Maybe I should file a patent? Then again I don't have something as damning as this drawing that is included in the patent:


I can see all 3 guys at Minerva now sitting around a decrepit table and one of them pipes up "Hey, I found this old drawing we did in 1997 ... hmmm, lets make 200 the memory card slot, 202 can be the headphones and BAM! we have ourselves an iphone-is-infringing-on-our-patent meal ticket. "

In typical "obvious patent" form

Minerva on Tuesday also filed two additional suits of similar nature. One targets Research In Motion and Cricket Communications, while the other names 29 defendants, including AT&T Mobility, LG, Palm, Motorola, Nokia, Alltel, Dobson Cellular, Helio, HP, MetroPCS Wireless, Sprint Spectrum, Nextel, T-Mobile USA, Tracfone Wireless, Cellco Partnership, Virgin Mobile, HTC, Kyocera Wireless, Pantech Wireless, Sanyo, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung.

sources: Macnn.com & AppleInsider.com