Android and KDE PIM

[asarge]

I don’t know if this is the right place to ask, but has anyone had any success in syncing and android phone to KDE PIM?
I’m just looking for a new phone and was wondering if this would work. I’m mostly after being able to sync Kontact and the Calender.

[asarge]

Anyone?
I’m looking at the HTC Desire or myself & my wife (or an iPhone).

Have I posted this in the wrong area or is Android a bit new at the moment?
Thanks for reading

[knurpht]

From what it looks like nobody here. I have a friend with a G1 and an openSUSE computer, I’ll mail him to ask what can be done.

[gminnerup]

I gave up on KDE PIM because of its inability to sync with anything…

[Caleb_IX]

@asarge

I don’t know if this is the right place to ask, but has anyone had any success in syncing and android phone to KDE PIM?
I’m just looking for a new phone and was wondering if this would work. I’m mostly after being able to sync Kontact and the Calender.

What you mean with “synchronisation” you think you emails, time date…)?

You don’t need a “synchronisation” like with windows ce. You can mount your android phone like a drive. Use the app “auto mount your sd card” so you can transfer sound, files, movies, pdf’s on your android smartphone. The android os makes the auto sync, if you are connected to the internet with the google server…

If you use android os, better use gmail, so you can save your contacts and calendar in the “cloud”. So can get this informations everywhere an…and if your phone gets lost…you do not lost your contacts. You can make “backup” if you not trust in google. There a lot of apps in the market… I’m very confident…

[asarge]

@Caleb_IX

What you mean with “synchronisation” you think you emails, time date…)?

You don’t need a “synchronisation” like with windows ce. You can mount your android phone like a drive. Use the app “auto mount your sd card” so you can transfer sound, files, movies, pdf’s on your android smartphone. The android os makes the auto sync, if you are connected to the internet with the google server…

If you use android os, better use gmail, so you can save your contacts and calendar in the “cloud”. So can get this informations everywhere an…and if your phone gets lost…you do not lost your contacts. You can make “backup” if you not trust in google. There a lot of apps in the market… I’m very confident…

Sorry. I want to be able to sync the calender mostly and possibly my contacts. I wouldn’t bother syncing my emails.
Thanks

[Macro81]

I am also looking for an Android phone and I am waiting a little bit more until syncing is working better.

What I found out is that you can use Akonadi (which was imho a very good idea by the KDE guys). You should use KDE 4.4 and install an extra package called akonadi_googledata from the KDE 4.4 community repository.
With this resource-type Akonadi is able to sync contacts from google (the new KAddressbook can utilize Akonadi).
Its also possible to sync the calendar but as far as I know there is not KDE-App using this resource by now.

But you might want to wait until KDE 4.5 since more PIM applications are said to be using Akonadi then.

So until now, the only way to “sync” is by going the way over the google services. There is no tool that syncs the data directly from phone to desktop.

[Caleb_IX]

@Macro81

What I found out is that you can use Akonadi (which was imho a very good idea by the KDE guys). You should use KDE 4.4 and install an extra package called akonadi_googledata from the KDE 4.4 community repository.
With this resource-type Akonadi is able to sync contacts from google (the new KAddressbook can utilize Akonadi).
Its also possible to sync the calendar but as far as I know there is not KDE-App using this resource by now.

thx for the info. First time i heard about this!

[Macro81]

You probably have to be a bit stubborn to get it working though

First important thing: go to system-settings (not yast) -> network -> proxy -> choose “directly connected to the internet”
otherwise the plugin will not be able to connect to Google.

Then you have two ways in adding this resource

1. use KAddressbook -> New Addressbook -> look for the Google Resource
2. Use the Akonadi Administration: search for Akonadi in control panel -> Setup Akondai Resource

Sometimes it behaves kinda strange, for example on my laptop I had to go with #1 but on my Desktop I had to use #2 in order to get the Addressbook appearing in KAddressbook (well a complete rewrite is always buggy in the first place)

The resource gets a weird name, just rename it in KAddressbook.

Be aware, its still not production ready! I lost all my data due to a corrupt disc an thought “hey great…all my contacts are on google thanks to Akonadi” but somehow only the email and pictures were there afterwards but no phone numbers. I think I overwrote my contacts with the Akonadi resource from my second pc…so be a little bit carefull and make some backups

[asarge]

Thanks for that. If and when I get the phones I will give it a try (after backing up)

[djmills]

Hi, I installed akonadi_googledata but cannot find any setup menus for Kontact, Kmail or KAddressBook that use it. Do I have to create a new akonadi address book that I confiure to use gmail’s?

If so would I then have to move/copy all my contacts to this address book to get them to synchronise with gmail and hence my phone?

Thanks,

David.

[jsublette]

thanks Macro81. running kde 4.5.3 and those instructions still work.

[neildarlow]

I recently bought a ZTE Racer Android Phone and it synchronises Google Contacts and Google Calendars just fine.

The most difficult thing I found was configuring the KDE Resource features to ensure reliable operation. The problems I found were:

1. You need an event to be present in your Google Calendar before enabling the akonadi-gcal resource
2. I think enabling address groups for the akonadi-googledata Contacts resource prevents it from syncing properly
3. I think enabling journals for the akonadi-gcal Calendar resource prevents it from syncing properly

These features are still under development but, for me, they seem to be working reliably - at least until the next update

[tsu2]

Howdy,
Re Android functionality in general as of and up to about 2.x,

When you start to investigate what you can do directly between an Android device and a PC over a serial link, you start by looking at the capabilities of ADB (Android Device Bridging) which is included in the Android SDK on Google (If you’re not developing, all you need is the ADB app file, nothing else is needed).

You’ll find that in the area of synchronization, ADB supports only files… not applications.

Because what you’re looking for is a higher level of synchronization, you should take a look at synchronizing through a PIM service… although Akondai is mentioned, more basically you only need to do an import/export of your Google Contacts since every Android device today requires associating with a Google Account for activation. You can either do that manually or setup a daemon process… so for instance a simple Google search turns up another method that does this

Linux.com :: How to make Kontact work with Google Apps

I guess an enterprising person could easily create a direct serial (USB cable or Bluetooth) solution by simply running ADB synchronizing a Kontact export file and the Android contact export, but I suspect it’d be vastly easier to sync Kontact with Google Contacts instead by periodically export/import to a CSV file from Kontact, then importing into Google.

Tony

[tsu2]

Since last night,
I had another look at this.
GCaldaemon looks like a promising way to sync various PIMs with Google Calendar and Contacts without requiring a third party service.

I’ve only been able to sync up a Standard Gmail Calendar at this point using the graphical config editor (./config-editor.sh). Won’t work connecting to a Google Premium Account which is demanding a captcha, when I get time I’ll try editing the config files directly to get around the verification requirement in the GUI.

Tony