The other day my original T-Mobile color Sidekick gave up the ghost from many years of beloved use. I depressed the wheel button, and it sank into the device, as if the little axle it spun on had broken. No amount of twiddling was able to fix it, and I had to admit to myself that it was finally time for a new phone. As it was, the backlight had pretty much all but given out anyhow.
I picked up the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 and transfering my SIMM and account could not have been easier. The process took about 5 minutes from phone selection to leaving the store.
I was not happy with the fact that I lost my applications such as the SSH Terminal. I guess I couldn’t complain, given that I got in when those applications were free. Now that I’m working for a company that thinks having Internet access is a good thing, I really haven’t had need for it anyhow. Sigh; I’ll still miss it.
I was surprised to learn that my phone also served as a camera. The old Sidekick had this little camera device you plugged into the side. This one was built in. And it was better. And the phone has a memory stick, so you can store your photos there. Neat. The phone also has the ability to hook up to the computer, act as a hard drive, and store MP3s there as well. Nifty!
This more than made up for the fact the keyboard layout had changed and it felt like typing inside of a deeply recessed box. I’ll get used to it.
But my real excitement perked up when I saw the phone was BlueTooth enabled, and I was even more happier when the Mac was able to pair up with the phone with virtually no effort and certainly no problems. My hopes, however, were dashed as I saw the phone offered no services my computer could take care of.
Turns out the solution was The Missing Sync, which takes the Mac OS X calendar, address books, and to do lists and beams them to the T-Mobile server, making my phone match my address book …and my address book match my phone.
The first problem I had there was that the Sync failed with a really obscure and useless error message. A little research showed that T-Mobil’s server gets really unhappy if the First and Last names are both blank. At least one has to be filled in, and this is not necessarily the case with any Company records. So I munged my Address Book on my Mac into conformance.
The sync worked. But it also brought in “duplicate” records from my phone, which was expected.
So, I spent a while combining records so that I had the superset of all information, trying to get everything with the most recent information. A second sync worked great.
But that’s when I noticed that my icon for my record in the address book had changed. It defaulted to one of the standard OS X icons, instead of my photo.
I tried to change it back by taking my picture with the built-in iSight. Nope, though it did update my login account picture. Then I tried dragging an image file to it. Again, it changed my login image under Preferences, but it did not change my address book picture. I tried changing my image from the login preferences screen, and that didn’t work either.
Eventually I stumbled on the solution, after finding relatively little on Apple’s support site.
Click the picture, press Delete, and it will disappear. Then use any of the methods above to put a new picture in that spot. Worked great.