Synching with the Sony Ericsson K550i from Linux

My old Sony Ericsson T630 has, poor thing, found a watery grave at the bottom of the River Cherwell. Its replacement is a Sony Ericcson K550i.

I had my contacts list from the old phone backup up to my laptop using Multisync over Bluetooth. So the first big question - would I be able to restore the backup onto the K550i?

The laptop runs Debian Unstable with a KDE desktop. I set a Bluetooth phone name and enabled Bluetooth, and after a while KBluetooth found the phone and I could browse the phone file system.

So I started Multisync. I edited the configuration pair, went to options for the IrMC mobile device, made sure the connection type was set to Bluetooth and selected 'Search for units…'. It successfully found the K550i and updated the Bluetooth device address and channel.

Emboldened with this, I installed the KDE calendar and tried syncing with that as well. I did not manage to get events to sync in either direction. No idea why.

So I tried syncing. No luck. I enable the experimental Resync button, and tried that. It detected that the phone side had been reset since the last sync, and asked if I wanted to restore. Yes, please! But still no luck.

Stumbling around at random, I tried the IrMC Mobile Device 'Options' tab, and unclicked all the entries on 'Bug workarounds' therein. Success! The sync completed and I have my contacts list back again.

Last night on a whim I tried syncing with my KDE address book. I succeeded in syncing contacts with Kitchensync on Debian Testing. I set up the mobile as an IrMC device accessed through Bluetooth, and used the KDE Desktop as the other half of the group. I unchecked everything except contacts in the list of info to sync.

The initial sync produced a few 'collision' dialogs. These don't seem to work properly; at least they didn't show me what was in conflict. But I clicked blindly on the buttons and eventually the sync finished.