Since first week of 2009 I use Nokia E66 phone. It is nice device and is expandable with many applications due to fact that it runs Symbian (S60 3rd FP1). But as usual there is a problem with it — syncing or rather lack of it (at least under Linux).
Under MS Windows there is “Nokia PC Suite” set of applications. It is heavy and ugly — mostly because vendor had own idea how application UI should look. As usual it is unable to keep device data available in any sensible format — all it do is syncing Phone “installed PIM” (which mean MS Outlook or Lotus Notes). It does not even have VCard import/export which will work good (I had to kill application after attempt to import 32KB file with ~200 vcards in it). So basically all what I can do with it is making backups of phone contents (but for that there is also application on phone which use memory card for keeping backups).
Other option is OxyCube application. But it is too expensive so I do not even bother to check how good it is.
But how to sync under Linux? This is good question… First idea which came to my mind was OpenSync. But which version to use? Last stable (0.22) or current development one (0.38)? Their homepage says:
Releases 0.22 (and 0.2x svn branch) and before are considered stable and suitable for production. 0.3x releases introduce major architecture and API changes and are targeted for developers and testers only and may not even compile or are likely to contain severe bugs.
0.3x releases are not recommended for end users or distribution packaging.
So stable one is recommended but no one supports it as developers forgot how it worked. This is not strange thing because this release is over 2 years old now. So maybe development version should be used? No… I was told few times that it can crash, do dirty things etc. so it can not be trusted at all. And there is no plugin to get KDE4 PIM apps synced (plugin for KDE3 can be used after some tweaks).
Effect is that after firmware update my phone has all contacts restored from phone backup but lost all calendar entries…