Exporting Contacts from Plaxo to Nokia 6100

Instead of using up my equipment credit from T-Mobile for signing a new contract, I am using a Nokia 6100 my friend from Germany had given to me. This is a nice and small mid-range phone.

The challenge was to prepopulate the new phone with a selection and projection of my contacts stored on Plaxo. I was not even looking for bidirectional synchronization because I don't mind making incremental changes on both Plaxo and the phone, as long as I have the ability to back up the phone data reliably.

Based on information available on the Nokia support site, I ordered an original Nokia CA-42 true USB cable (among other accessories) for US$22 instead of a cheap DKU-5 clone that merely emulates a serial connection over USB.

The situation:

• This phone is not supported by Apple iSync.
• It is supported by the Nokia PC Suite. Because I don't run Windows natively on any machine (not a safe practice in my opinion), I installed the Nokia PC Suite on a VirtualBox VM running Windows XP. On a Mac host, I couldn't connect because the Mac grabs the USB device so Windows thinks its already in use. On a Linux host (I use Ubuntu Hardy 8.04), I could connect the phone just fine, but the phone book component of the suite kept crashing miserably and repeatedly and I decided to abandon this route.
• It is also supported by a shareware program for the Mac called MegaCellX. Although this is a nice program that supports a number of phone models and integrates with Address Book, on certain Nokia phones it does not support multi-number contacts, so you get multiple entries on the phone for people with more than one number.
  

I eventually got the job done this morning around 3 as follows:

1. Plaxo itself does not support selective export, but Address Book does (synchronized via Plaxo for Mac, and Plaxo's user-defined categories show up very nicely as groups in Address Book. I exported a selection of about 150 contacts in the (text-based) vCard 2.1 format.
2. Using a combination of grep and Emacs, I manually fixed the following kinks that cause problems with the next step:
• illegal characters in phone numbers (anything other than digits, *, +, or p) (everything up to this point does get imported, but you need to switch to SIM contacts and back to memory contacts to refresh the view)
  
• use of FN: instead of the expected N:
• strings in non-quoted-printable UTF-8 (I cannot believe this is still broken in Address Book) show up as empty fields but don't disrupt the import
  
• unnecessary fields (this is the projection part)
3. Using Wammu on my Linux box, I transfered these contacts to my phone! I had to cycle a few times between the preceding step and this one until all contacts got imported cleanly. I still had to do some editing in Wammu to add special characters in names etc.
   
4. For some multi-number contacts, I changed the default number on the phone.