At this point I had most of the phone numbers and e-mail addresses I used most often loaded on my new smart phone via Gmail, so I could reasonably say that the phone was fully ready to function as a phone. Had I been unable to do that, I would have seriously considered returning the thing to T-Mobile—supposedly they'll take back any phone within 14 days if you're not satisfied, though I've never tested this claim—and gotten a simpler model more closely resembling the one that was lost.
But I'd gotten a smart phone in the hope that it would replace not only the old phone but also the four-year-old Palm Pilot that was the latest of a decade's worth of PDAs I'd owned from that company. The most important function for which I use the Palm has been its calendar/datebook. It's not only a way to plan future activities, but a record of past events—how many hours I worked the week before last, the dates of Donna's various surgeries, whether I'm eligible to give blood again—which I may want to consult at short notice.
The phone has a built-in calendar app, and I did try entering a few events. But neither Samsung nor T-Mobile claims to have any way of getting the many years of information currently on my Palm into the phone. T-Mobile's people, when recommending I use Gmail to handle the Contacts function, also steered me toward Google Calendar, for similar reasons, claiming that it could import my Palm data and, once imported, sync up automatically with the phone.
Having spent about 8 hours over the weekend trying to get the Contacts data exported by the Palm software to match the specifications that Gmail wanted but didn't actually warn anyone about, I expected hassles of similar magnitude copying my Calendar data. Thanks to the non-standardization of software, though, the hassles were entirely different, so that the experience I'd gained on the Contacts adventure was of very little help in negotiating the Calendar maze.
Google Calendar, like Gmail, claims to import data from other software in a couple of formats, CSV being the most generic. But Palm software is unwilling to export its Calendar data to CSV the way it does with Contacts data. The only options the export function offers involve a format called DBA which is apparently proprietary to Palm. Google Calendar doesn't know from DBA.
Some research into Palm's user forums showed me a migration path purported to work: Palm Desktop offers a way to sync its data to Microsoft Outlook, and Google Calendar says it can import data directly from Outlook. By pure happenstance, I have an old version of Outlook installed on my home laptop (as part of the MS Office package), but I'd literally never used it. (I use it at work on a daily basis.) This meant I could sync the Palm data into a pristine Outlook database, with no risk of screwing up existing data if the sync failed. Let's roll!
So I fired up Outlook on my home laptop for the first time, then went looking for the Palm Desktop function that would sync up with Outlook. I didn't find it. A little more research determined that that function did not exist on the version of Palm Desktop that I'd been using quite happily for five years. Update ho!
So I downloaded the new Palm Desktop version and installed it. It seems to be from a different company; it's now not just Palm Desktop but Palm Desktop by ACCESS, and installs in a different directory. That turned out to be my salvation—but I'm getting ahead of myself.
As one of the last steps in installing the new Palm Desktop, it asked if I wanted to sync my Palm's built-in databases (calendar, contacts, memos, and to-do list) with Palm Desktop or with Outlook. I'd have preferred a "both of the above" option, but no such luck. So I chose "Outlook" and then did the sync when prompted. It took a long time, but then the first sync after installing new software often does. Half an hour later, the Desktop informed me the sync was complete. I opened Outlook with a sense of anticipation, and found...that its calendar function now showed a tiny fraction of the events on my Palm: only those that were repeating (birthdays and some holidays, essentially). None of the others were there.
Interestingly, all the Palm's contacts seemed to have gotten copied over into Outlook's contacts list. If I'd known that earlier, perhaps I could have saved some time and hassle. All the memos seemed to have gotten copied, too, but Google doesn't have a memo function right now; the best I'd be able to do was create over 800 separate Google Docs. That's assuming, of course, that I was able to import to Google from Outlook without glitches—something I was not about to bet on, given recent history.
Further Web research turned up no previous instances of a Palm sync to Outlook failing to copy non-recurring calendar items, and when I posted a query about this to the Palm forums, I got no responses at all, so I decided that this was a dead end and that I'd best go back to syncing everything from my Palm to Palm Desktop for the interim. I spent some time finding the option in Desktop to switch back, then ran another sync. This one ran for more than half an hour without showing signs of completing; it seemed to be stuck in the calendar sync stage. I tried aborting, resyncing, rebooting, and even uninstalling and reinstalling Palm Desktop, and got nothing for my troubles but repeated stalls; worse, when I looked at the actual Palm device again, I found that all of the calendar data was now missing. This did not make me happy.
After a day or two of this, I finally had the inspiration of uninstalling Palm Desktop and reinstalling the old version—whose databases had never been wiped out and were still in the old directory. I had to do, in addition, a cold reset on the Palm, wiping out all the data that hadn't already been wiped out, before I was finally able to resync and find everything there except the previous two days' updates.
So I had my Palm data back, but still had no calendar or memo data on my phone yet. I decided to give the calendar issue a rest and spend some time on the memos. As I mentioned, Google's suite of apps so far includes nothing like the memo pad function on a Palm, so getting something that would sync automatically looked like a fool's errand; just finding something that would organize my memos similarly and import them from the Palm desktop was all I could reasonably hope for.
I did some hunting in the Android Market (the official app shop) and located an app called NoteEverything, which claimed (among other things) to import Palm memos/notes databases. I figured that if it could do that, it must be able to organize the memos along similar lines, so I downloaded and installed it. I followed the instructions at the Web site, and in about 15 minutes I had all 800-odd memos copied over, organized into folders just as they were on the Palm. After all the other difficulties, this seemed too good to be true.
In fact, the only part that didn't work was an add-on called NE Gdocs, which is supposed to be capable of exporting individual memos to Google Docs so that they can be edited on a full-size computer, and re-importing them back. I exchanged a few e-mails with the vendor (who I suspect is one guy working in his garage in Germany), and eventually uninstalled both Note Everything and NE Gdocs and then reinstalled them. Now it all (knock silicon) seems to be working.
So two out of three ain't bad. I'm now updating my calendar data base in parallel on the Palm and on Google Calendar while working gradually on hand-entering archival items. I guess I really don't need to have at my fingertips my arrival and departure times at Wieden every day for the past four and a half years.