Contact Solution [Contact List Management]

By Teo

I'm a happy user of the HTC Touch PDA from Sprint. I was able to receive both my personal mail and my work mail. Unfortunately, right before my flight out to California this past Saturday, my phone decided to wipe all of its contacts along with it. Let me tell you, don't play with your contact list right before the plane takes off--You'll spend much of the flight wondering how to get your contact list back.

Luckily, I had exported my outlooks contact list in a CSV file. So began, over the last couple days, my journey to sync up all my contacts. I've tried plaxo but was never happy with it. It constantly crashed my outlook and create tons of duplicates. I found it unfriendly and inconvenient.

Add to the mix that K and I now have a MacBook... (We're supposed to share it, but since my vaio died on me, i'm the primary user...thanks k!).

I've been trying to figure out how to get the Outlook CSV file, Mac Address Book, Gmail, and my HTC phone to sync. If you know if an elegant solution, let me know.

At first, I found an interesting hack on lifehacker. At first it didn't work, but after I linked my ipod to the mac (the ipod syncs to my pc desktop). Course, as a new mac user, I'm not terribly crazy about editing my plist. I'm afraid of breaking things.

But then I cam across Soocial. It's still in beta right now, but so far, I'm a fan. Given how volatile these betas are, Soocial saves a back-up of your contact list and even sends you a copy via gmail. It even identifies doubles for you and allows your to merge them. Take that, plaxo!

The merge process is a bit slow, but I'm more than happy to give soocial some time to prove itself to me.

So one day later, how far have I come? My old CSV contact file that was synced to my phone is now living in my Mac addressbook and gmail. But my phone still has no numbers.

It's all about baby steps.

Lessons learned?
Windows XP desktop + Windows Mobile + macbook + iPod that can't decide if it wants to sync to a pc or mac = headache