After having a Sony Ericsson K850i for almost 18 months (and under contract on until June 2012 unless I buy an unlocked device), I thought it was about time to get all my contacts in order. Trying to find a seamless way to keep the phone, iPod Touch, and Hotmail contacts all synchronized wasn’t so easy. My main stumbling block was me being a stickler for an email address I’ve been using since 1997, but a solution must exist!
I had to install the Sony Ericsson PC Suite which promptly gave me the message:
Reading mobile phone’s contacts failed.
Few relevant Google results match my problem other than this site which claims you need to install drivers (which the PC Suite does.) The error message is also mentioned nowhere in Ericsson’s support pages.
I figured out I had disabled phone modem-related drivers a year ago because every time it was connected via USB, Windows would throw up five popups on new hardware installed. Every time. So I enabled those in Device Manager and also had to reinstall the PC Suite before my phone would be recognized for syncing.
You can use Google Sync for over-the-air Gmail contacts but I don’t have any data plan so I’m not touching that with Canadian per-kilobyte pricing. Over USB, Thunderbird isn’t an option; only MS Outlook. So my solution was to download a Hotmail .csv, import that into MS Outlook Express (like I’d pay for MS Office), then use the PC Suite to do the final sync.
Problem is I still had contacts on my SIM that the software can’t remove. The K850i has no method on the phone itself to batch delete contacts from the SIM. I had to do that manually or else there were redundant contacts for most people. Sony Ericsson’s OS already has latency issues, so it was unbelievably laggy on 165 contacts where I’d have to wait half a second between deletes for the list to (twice) refresh. Then the PC Suite offered no option to only sync contacts with (mobile, work, or home) phone numbers so I had to manually remove entries under the software’s Contacts tab which luckily has a table with phone numbers in view. So in the end, I found no elegant solution to sync contacts.
For the iPod, I just had to import the Hotmail .csv into Gmail, then sync in iTunes with one click. The final result is a series of steps I don’t want to attempt again:
