This is the second article about the data migration from Sharp Zaurus to Nokia N800. This time it is about the PIM information, particularly the Address Book contents. Actually you can do it using the desktop software, but in my case I did not have this option. Zaurus does not synchronize with Mac and, in fact, I did something weird with my Zaurus and I could not synchronize it anymore even with the old Linux and Windows software. So, the goal was to export the address book contents from the Zaurus, merge it into OS X Address Book and then synchronize the latter one with N800 (this is the topic for another article :) ).

Old versions of the Zaurus firmware used plain-text XML files for the PIM data. Newer versions of the firmware use QPE database for the address book contents. Thus, first I needed to export the data from Zaurus. Native Address Book application cannot export all the data in one shot, all you can do is to beam the items one by one.

After relatively long search I have found an interesting tool called ZDBat made by a Japanese developer. This tool can export and import the PIM database content to/from CSV format. If you run it like this on your Zaurus:

	$ zdbat address -r -c utf8 > abook.csv

you will export your Address Book to the CSV file. Make sure you use appropriate encoding (for most of us utf8 should work fine).

The next challenge was to identify the CSV fields. They have 4-letter cryptic names and, unfortunately, the description is in Japanese. I have decided that creating a test record and using it to match the field names to the address book fields is a bit easier than to learn this beautiful language, so here is the mapping:

CSV header name Description
CARDID CardID
CATEGORY Category
FULL Full name
TITL Title (not used)
LNME Last name
FNME First name
MNME Middle name
SUFX Suffix
FLAS Last name, First name,Middle name
LNPR Last name
FNPR First name
NAPR Last name,First name, Middle name
CPNY Company
CPPR Company
SCTN Department
PSTN Job title
TEL2 Work phone
FAX2 Work fax
CPS2 Work mobile
BSTA Work state
BCTY Work city
BSTR Work street
BZIP Work ZIP
BCTR not used
BWEB not used
OFCE not used
PRFS not used
ASST not used
MNGR not used
BPGR not used
CPS1 Home mobile
TEL1 Home phone
FAX1 Home fax
HSTA Home state
HCTY Home city
HSTR Home street
HZIP Home ZIP
HCTR not used
HWEB not used
DMAL emails
MAL1 emails
SPUS not used
GNDR Gender(1=male, 0=female)
BRTH Birthday
ANIV not used
NCNM not used
CLDR not used
MEM1 Notes
GRPS not used

Please note that not all the fields are used for the address book data and some values are duplicated. You can actually pass the list of the desired fields to zdbat to select only the ones you are interested in. After that, importing the CSV data in the OS X Address Book is simple - just select the appropriate CSV headers for each address book field and you are done.

In the next article I will explain how you can synchronize the OS X address book with N800.

References

  1. ZDBat for Zaurus
  2. GPE for Nokia N800



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Published

20 February 2008

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