I have a new
phone; well not
bleeding edge new, but it’s fresh from the packet and shiny and it
has many redeeming features over my old phone: the primary “menu”
button works. (There’s a short and not terribly interesting story
behind this button, so I won’t bore you with the details!)
After swapping the SIM card, I discovered that the phonebook was not
stored on the card as I had expected, but must be in the phone memory!
Curses!
I’m not sure I trust my old phone to copy the addresses to the SIM
card safely, so instead I want to get the phone to synchronise with my
laptop, and then once my contacts are all safely backed up, I can
resync with the new phone and all will be good with the world.
However, I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. The ThinkPad is running
Ubuntu; it has the irda module loaded, and as far as I can tell,
irdadump listens to… something. Setting the old phone to IR mode
shows nothing though.
So, I ask the Internets: how do I get the laptop and phone to speak
to each other over IR, and once that’s going, what application do I
use to sync with?
I admit I expected it to just work, as has been the case mostly with
Ubuntu interoperating with Things. A few googles shows some
ubuntuforums posts that weren’t very helpful; creating device nodes
sounds like something that should already be done for me.
Feel free to comment, or by email, or blog about
it if you know the answers or can
provide helpful advice. JWZ’s usual
rules apply
for replies, thanks.