eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Here’s the last installment of my lost and found Treo 650 mobile phone story. Many of you wrote me about Butler. I was using a 2005 version of this Palm utility and, on your advice, I bought the newest version to get the remote data lock and wipe capabilities. But I was greedy. I got the treotastic package that has several other utilities including Initiate, Genius and some other neat tools. The only problem is that when I synced my Treo, there wasn’t enough free memory, and the device got stuck in a never-ending loop of trying, without success, to open the address book. (I have over 700 contacts, many with notes attached, so it isn’t a small file.)
IT said: press the red power button and do a device reset. This takes the Treo back to factory settings. So, I wiped the brain of my Treo and started from scratch.
The process went much more smoothly than I could have hoped. You see, I don’t use the Palm Desktop at home, I use Microsoft’s Outlook client. Now that I think of it I probably could have set up hotsync to override the device with data stored on the computer. But that’s not what I did.Instead I:
Step 1. Export contact data from Outlook to a comma delimited file.
Step 2. Import contact data into Palm Desktop.
Step 2.5. Match fields so that the correct data ends up in the right field.
Step 3. Hotsync.
This only took about 10 minutes. When I opened my eyes after hitting the hotsync button, I couldn’t believe what I saw. All my applications, files, notes, pictures and yes, contacts were right where they were supposed to be. As far as I can tell, the only fidelity problem I can see is that where I had colors assigned to each category of appointment type, there were now only blue and grey color assignments.
Not too bad for 10 minutes of work.
I’m glad I went through the Recovery part of Disaster Recovery. Given the ease of getting my Treo back up and running, I’m sold on keeping it until it either conks out (it’s kinda built like a tank, so I don’t see that in the near future) or the wireless company stops supporting it.
In any case, I have my phone. It’s working quite nicely after the brain cleaning. Now if I can just hang onto it.
Does the iPhone have a Butler? (Can you change the battery in an iPhone yet?) Let me know at csturdevant shift two eweek d o t com.