So, with my very old Motorola RAZR on its last legs (I got sand in it, somehow) and my T-Mobile contract up, I decided to get the new Helio Ocean. I won’t get into all the aches and pains of my first few days with it. In a nutshell: childish anticipation as my new toy was shipped, then disappointment due to various glitches during activation. Now, I’m developing a love for the Ocean once again, as I learn to overcome some of its bad user interfaces and get it to do what I want it to.

Case in point: Synchronizing contacts with a Mac is a pain in the ass, but I’ve mapped it out, below. There are tons of crippled features on the phone (restricted bluetooth services, blocked network bridging, no calendar sync with Macs, saccharine ringtones, etc.) These are the rage-inducing par for the course, with American service providers. I haven’t found workarounds for most of these, yet, but I did figure out this one. Other Mac users might save some effort by piggybacking on my efforts.

The basic idea is simple. You just have to export a CSV file that you then import into Helio’s Mail service. Once the contacts are there, your phone will sync with them automatically. Gizmodo wrote up a good overview of the process.

The difficult part for Mac users, however, is getting a CSV file out of Address Book.app and into the Outlook CSV format that the Helio webmail app expects.

1. Download and install Apple’s AddressBook2CSV Exporter.app. It’s a quick download and install.
2. Use to AddressBook2CSV Exporter.app export the contacts you want in Helio’s service and save them as a CSV file in a convenient location.
3. Now, the fun part: hand-editing the CSV file. Unfortunately, AddressBook2CSV Exporter.app names its columns differently than Microsoft Outlook would, and it’s the latter that Helio’s web mail expects. Download this sample CSV file, which is in the Outlook format.
4. Open the sample CSV file and your export file in a spreadsheet editor. I used NeoOffice, because on OS X, Microsoft Excel is a dump in the pants.
5. Copy the columns that you want from your export file into the sample file, but leave off the column names on the export file; you want the first row of column names from the sample file, which is in “Outlook format.” Note, interestingly, that Helio will extract mobile numbers from the “Home Phone” column, even though there is a “Mobile Phone” column in the sample file. Paste your numbers in the “Home Phone” column.
6. Done! upload it to Helio Webmail and synchronize, as per the Gizmodo instructions.

Hope that helps. Until Helio gets their act together with synchronization, this is the pain we Apple users will be feeling.

Note: The sample CSV file I used was obtained by exporting my contacts from Gmail. If you happento have your contact info into a Gmail account (or can get it there), you may have a better solution on your hands.

Related Posts:

• Virgin Acquires Helio (June, 2008)
• More Notes on the Helio (July, 2007)
• Star Trek Communicator (October, 2005)
• Samsung NV-10 (September, 2007)
• Samsung’s 10MP Camera Phone (March, 2006)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 2:32 am and is filed under notes, personal, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.