Nov 28: How to move Contacts and SMS from WindowsMobile to Android
First of all a short disclaimer: I've done all this for myself. This is no general solution but just for my own purpose. The code is really a hack I post it here just as an inspiration.
I got myself a new Smartphone with Android 2.0 and wanted to transfer all my Contacts and SMS from my old WM6 - without Google.
First the contacts: To transfer contacts, there is a wonderful standard called vcard. The android address book is able to import .vcf (vcard) files from the telephones sd card and WM6 can create a vcard if you send a contact via bluetooth. But there are three problems: 1. Android can't receive contacts via bluetooth, 2. WM6 can only send one contact at once, so it's no fun if you have more than 20 contacts and 3. the vcard implementation of WM6 is not correct, so that contacts exported like this can't be imported by android.
So the solution to export the contacts from the WM6 phone is the very good program PIM Backup, which I already used to backup the phone. The app stores its backups in a zip-compressed file, in which the data is stored in a plain text file. For each contact you have a new line and the values are stored separated with semi-colons.
I wrote some code in perl to convert the backup file to multiple vcard files, one for each contact. After this i just copied these files to the Android sd-card and used the contact import function.
Contact pictures are not supported, but feel free to extend and/or rewrite the code!
The second thing are the SMS: I again used the PIM Backup application to export the SMS, because WM6 has no solution to export SMS. The file structure is like the one from the contact backup, one line for each message, fields are separated with semi-colons. But this time there is a field with the message text inside and it the text contains a line break you'll have one in the backup file too. I edited the file with vim and its string substiturion function to replace line breaks in the message text with the string <BR>. In the perl script later on it will be replaced again to a line feed.
Now we have the input data, but how can we import it into the Android SMS software? There is no import function in the application itself, but there is a backup software for SMS in the Android Marketplace called SMS Backup & Restore. This app stores its backup in a very neat XML file called sms.xml.
My perl code now converts the backup file from the WM6 phone to the sms.xml format. All you have to do is replace the sms.xml on the sd-card with the generated on and restore it with the Android application. Et voila, all SMS are on the Android phone and it looks like you had received all the messages with this phone :-)
I got myself a new Smartphone with Android 2.0 and wanted to transfer all my Contacts and SMS from my old WM6 - without Google.
First the contacts: To transfer contacts, there is a wonderful standard called vcard. The android address book is able to import .vcf (vcard) files from the telephones sd card and WM6 can create a vcard if you send a contact via bluetooth. But there are three problems: 1. Android can't receive contacts via bluetooth, 2. WM6 can only send one contact at once, so it's no fun if you have more than 20 contacts and 3. the vcard implementation of WM6 is not correct, so that contacts exported like this can't be imported by android.
So the solution to export the contacts from the WM6 phone is the very good program PIM Backup, which I already used to backup the phone. The app stores its backups in a zip-compressed file, in which the data is stored in a plain text file. For each contact you have a new line and the values are stored separated with semi-colons.
I wrote some code in perl to convert the backup file to multiple vcard files, one for each contact. After this i just copied these files to the Android sd-card and used the contact import function.
Contact pictures are not supported, but feel free to extend and/or rewrite the code!
The second thing are the SMS: I again used the PIM Backup application to export the SMS, because WM6 has no solution to export SMS. The file structure is like the one from the contact backup, one line for each message, fields are separated with semi-colons. But this time there is a field with the message text inside and it the text contains a line break you'll have one in the backup file too. I edited the file with vim and its string substiturion function to replace line breaks in the message text with the string <BR>. In the perl script later on it will be replaced again to a line feed.
Now we have the input data, but how can we import it into the Android SMS software? There is no import function in the application itself, but there is a backup software for SMS in the Android Marketplace called SMS Backup & Restore. This app stores its backup in a very neat XML file called sms.xml.
My perl code now converts the backup file from the WM6 phone to the sms.xml format. All you have to do is replace the sms.xml on the sd-card with the generated on and restore it with the Android application. Et voila, all SMS are on the Android phone and it looks like you had received all the messages with this phone :-)
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