Synchronizing contacts and calendars between a Nokia phone and Mac OS
Not everyone has an iPhone
A lot of us – either out of aversion to iPhone’s high price (in India at least) or out of our love for a tactile keypad/keyboard – still use a Nokia phone. Now Nokia makes some decent phones that often ship with a wonderful piece of software called the PC Suite – which as the name indicates – runs on PCs only. Among other things, PC Suite enables seamless synchronization of your Outlook contacts and calendar with your Nokia phone.
Enter iSync (and exit)
To enable this functionality, Mac OS comes with an application called iSync. iSync has a plug-in architeture that allows the phone manufacturers to write plug-ins that enable Address Book and iCal synchronization with your phone. Apple maintains a knowledge base of iSync supported phones but chances are you won’t find your phone there. The list either has phones that are years old and therefore out of circulation or has only the high-end models. Macs have never been on Nokia’s priority list and so if you own a mid-end phone (a Series 40 or Series 60 (aka S40/S60) phone that cost you somewhere between Rs. 4,500 to Rs. 12,000) chances are that you’ll find yourself without any iSync support.
But there is hope
That said, you can still make iSync talk to your phone. The instructions below are specific to Nokia 5000d. It should be possible to modify them appropriately for similar Nokia models.
Pair them up
Turn on your phone’s Bluetooth and pair it with your Mac. Make sure you can do things like transfer pictures from your phone’s camera to your machine over Bluetooth.
A minor iSync surgery
Launch Terminal and paste the following commands (press return after typing each line):
cd /Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/ cd Contents/PlugIns/PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources cp MetaClasses.plist MetaClasses.backup open .
This will open this (Applications/iSync.app…/Contents/Resources) folder in a Finder window. Locate the file called MetaClasses.plist. Right click it (Control + click), select Open With… and select TextEdit. You’ll have an XML file in front of you. Scroll down to the end. You’ll see three closing tags:
</dict> </dict> </plist>
Paste the following text between the two </dict> tags:
<key>com.nokia.5000</key>
<dict>
<key>Identification</key>
<dict>
<key>com.apple.gmi+gmm</key>
<string>Nokia+Nokia 5000d-2</string>
</dict>
<key>InheritsFrom</key>
<array>
<string>family.com.nokia.serie60v2.3</string>
</array>
<key>Services</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>ServiceName</key>
<string>com.apple.model</string>
<key>ServiceProperties</key>
<dict>
<key>ModelName</key>
<string>5000</string>
<key>PhoneIcon</key>
<string>NOK3230.tiff</string>
</dict>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
Voilà!
Save and close the file. Logout. Login. Start iSync and from the Devices menu select Add Device. Your phone will now show up in the iSync toolbar. You should be able to click the round Sync Devices button to synchronize your contacts and calendar with your phone.
You can click the Phone’s icon to modify the synchronization settings.
You can replace the generic looking icon, with a somewhat accurate Nokia 5000d icon, by:
a.) Saving this icon to /Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/
Contents/PlugIns/PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources. (Icon via Eric Fish)
b.) Replacing NOK3230.tiff in the text above with NOK5000.tiff. Don’t forget to save MetaClassess.plist, quit iSync and login again.
iSync and Nokia 5000d support 2-way sync – i.e. any contact or calendar event that you add (or for that matter modify or delete) on your phone shows up in your Address Book/iCal and vice versa.
Credits: I found most of this information while browsing this thread at Apple’s discussion forum.