I was impelled at the end of September, by the disappearance of my 2½-year-old cell phone, to acquire a new one. I'd been carrying a cell phone nearly constantly for over six years, upgrading every couple of years when the contract ran out and T-Mobile was disposed to offer me a deal. I'd also been carrying a Palm Pilot for over a decade, having won my first one (model V) in a contest at work, and having upgraded a few times as the devices reached senile dementia. Palm's user support is so poor as to be nonexistent, and for a few years I've been getting my model Tungsten E2 repaired regularly by a guy in Mankato, Minnesota, who's made a cottage industry out of fixing what Palm doesn't want to bother with. For some time I've thought that some device ought to exist that's smart enough to take on the functions of both the phone and the Palm Pilot, giving me less to carry on my belt. So instead of a simple replacement for the lost phone, I went for an upgrade to T-Mobile's star performer (that month), a Samsung Galaxy Vibrant running Android 2.1. It only took me a day or so to figure out how to make and receive calls, download mp3 files from my laptop and assign them as ringtones. So far, so good.
Regrettably, all the phone numbers I had stored on the old phone vanished when the phone did. I remembered using the Nokia software to back the phone's database up on the computer—but when I looked, the backup database was empty. Not to worry; most of that information was in the Contacts list on the Palm Pilot! All I had to do was export the Palm's Contacts file to the phone's Contacts file.
Several phone calls to T-Mobile later, I was convinced that it wasn't that simple. The phone's built-in Contacts function allows one phone number per name, nothing more; no home and work and cell numbers, no addresses, no e-addresses, no birthdays. Several T-Mobile customer service folk steered me toward Gmail; they said it, along with the other allied apps such as Google Calendar, could handle the analogous functions of a PDA, and, to boot, could automatically sync all data between Google's servers and my phone. So after determining that there was no easier way, and overcoming my misgivings about having all that data of mine out on the servers of someone whose pledge not to be evil seems somewhat malleable, I started trying to export my Palm Contacts data to Gmail (where I've had an account for a few years but never actually used it).
Gmail claims to sync up readily with all sorts of other desktop applications. Palm Desktop, however, isn't one of them. Gmail says all I have to do is get my Palm Contacts data exported as a CSV file, though, and Gmail will happily import that data. So I got Palm to create the CSV file of my Contacts, and asked Gmail to import it, and...got an error message. Following Gmail's Help system revealed that the CSV file would need just a tiny bit of editing (using Excel) before it would import properly. Mostly it would need a header row identifying the fields. The help page wasn't too specific about the field names to be used in the header row, implying that the import function was smart enough to recognize a wide variety of names.
After a couple of hours of experimentation, I was unable to get Gmail to recognize any field names other than "name" and "email address"; all other data got pulled in and lumped into a large field labeled "Notes," where I could see it but not do anything useful with it, such as use the phone numbers to make calls. T-Mobile's people were unable to help me on this, even though they'd been pushing me to use Gmail to begin with; it was now time to try to get help from Google.
Fortunately, a bit of Web searching turned up a couple of forum threads from people who'd gone through exactly the same difficulties a number of months ago. (This is the benefit of not being an Early Adopter.) The best answer I found was: add a record to Gmail's Contacts containing all the fields I wanted, have Gmail export it to a CSV file, and then follow the headers on that file as a template for the CSV file I was editing. So I created an entry for Joe Btfsplk, with a home address in Dogpatch, WV, a work address c/o Al Capp in New York, and a bunch of phone numbers and e-addresses, and I exported it. The resulting CSV file had over 80 columns, with header names like "Phone 2 - Type" and "Address 1 - Formatted" and "Yomi Name" and "Sensitivity"—the last two corresponding to fields that were blank for all entries. ("Yomi" seems to have something to do with phonetic representation of names in ideographic languages such as Chinese.)
So I spent a few hours massaging my CSV file into columns that matched this template. I think it was about 8 hours altogether, with time out for meals. I had to throw in a couple of simple Excel formulas to format addresses out of the street address/city/state/postal code components, and re-add the leading zeroes on New England and New Jersey ZIP codes that Excel wanted to drop. There was also a minor Palm glitch: all the birthdays prior to 1970 had been changed to 1970 (leaving month and day unaltered). I fixed about 40 of those manually. If you inexplicably felt a few years younger for several hours one Saturday in October, but it went away on Sunday morning, well, now you know why.
On about the tenth attempt, I finally got it to load correctly into Gmail, and moments later all the information was on my phone, synced up automatically as advertised. 8 hours divided by about 300 entries means about a minute and a half per entry; I don't think I saved much time compared to typing it all in from scratch, though I probably saved myself a few typos.
With my Contacts list now populated and fully useable for making calls and sending e-mails, it was time to turn to the Calendar function, where new challenges awaited.