Import contacts from Google Contacts to Palm M125

Import contacts from Google Contacts to Palm M125

Out of curiosity decided to play with the old Palm M125 PDA. It is the older PDA on Palm OS 4 with monochrome screen. Advantage of this PDA is that it is using 2 AAA batteries which could last a month.

Unsurprsingly even if the Windows Sync suite for this PDA doesn’t work anymore on Windows 10, the Linux suite pilot-link works perfectly.

The first thing I decided to do is to import my contacts from the Android phone to this little device.

One of the tools of the pilot-link suite is called pilot-address and it allows to import CSV with contacts to the Palm device.

Usage (assuming PILOTPORT environment variable is correctly set, in my case it is /dev/ttyUSB1)

pilot-addresses -w addresses.csv

to download all contacts from the Palm OS device,

pilot-addresses --delete-all

to delete all the contacts,

pilot-addresses -r new-contacts.csv

to upload all the contacts from new-contacts.csv to the Palm OS device.

Typically contacts on Android phone synced to the owner’s Google account, so the only task is to export them from Google Contacts as a CSV file, do the simple mapping of possible fields to the CSV suitable for the pilot-addresses tool, and upload them back.

The converter has been implemented in one evening in Common Lisp.

The limitations is that the Palm OS is pre-unicode OS, so the contacts has to be converted to the text format with some coding page. I’ve decided to go with Cyrillic CP1251 as half of my contacts are spelled in cyrillic, and as some of my other contacts are in Swedish, to drop the accents from the letters of the Swedish alphabet upon conversion.

The implementation uses cl-csv to read-write CSV and babel to decode between coding pages and UTF-8. The Makefile provided as with most of my tools to create command-line application, usage is on its github page