Palm Desktop and iPhone

Hi Carlos,
I am in the same situation as you: using Palm 680 and wanting to switch to iPhone. Have you made any progress with sync'ing your Palm to you iPhone. Please advise. I spoke to 2 people within AppleCare support.. and they had no suggestions, admitting that they did not know how to go about doing this... Best, Margus, Toronto, Canada

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

Mark/Space offers migration software for moving supported data from a Palm device to an iPhone here, but memos—as you are familiar with them in the Palm OS environment—are not supported by the iPhone and iTunes.

Hi Michael,
I'm in the same predicament as the original poster. My husband and I have 2 Treo 650's that use the Palm OS (4.2.1) to sync to our desktop. We have 8+ years of history with Palm and are literally freaked about losing it. We share our tower and use the same desktop so we may have to change to having separate desktops to boot (dang, have to figure out how to do that too). I'm curious about your recommendation of The Missing Sync vs. iSync. Is that your preference and why? I'm looking for the solution that needs the least amount of Excedrine Migraine on my part. Headed over to the iPhone discussion group now to figure out how 2 iPhones can share one Mac. Please use small words and short sentences as I am not very techie and after searching for a few hours now, my brain feels like mush.
Thanks. Susan

The key to understanding how to do this resides in having separate user accounts on your single Macintosh. This effectively creates a 'virtual' Macintosh for each of you, with each account on the single machine supporting a likely a single iPhone and possibly additional devices.

In my experience—for lots of different reasons, some of which will eventually become apparent to you—sharing is seldom easy. Or, practical. And, it virtually guarantees data deletion or corruption over time. Simply create a separate user account on your machine to avoid such problems.

The Missing Sync for Palm OS is far more configurable, flexible and reliable than iSync and the iSync Palm Conduit. This is particularly true for users of 'advanced' Palm devices: those which are post-Treo 650. You can, for example, synchronize a supported device via Bluetooth, USB or wired or terrestrial ethernet. You can pre-set conduit profiles to manage periodic synchronization, and avoid the essentially 'all-or-nothing' approach of the iSync Palm Conduit. You can synchronize memos, iPhoto content, non-AAC protected iTunes content, or use Avant Go.

You can download and install the software on a trial basis. Just be sure to carefully follow the instructions, which can be distilled down to…

• one final synchronization before configuring the Missing Sync for Palm OS
• an initial synchronization session during which you overwrite the contents of your handheld Palm device

Hi, I am having exactly the same problem you describe: need to migrate Calendar, Contacts, and Memos from Palm OS to iPhone, and want to make some Memos private and password-protected.
Have you found a way to do this?
Thanks.

I'd also like to be able to migrate my memos and addressbook notes to the iphone. I have too much stuff on the Palm to quit, but really want to get that darn thing.

How do we do this?

There is simply no support on the iPhone and in the Mac OS X environment for most of what you want to achieve. These features are largely exclusive to the Palm OS.

Generally, the best you can do is use a tool like Migration Assistant component of the Missing Sync for Palm OS, iTunes to the extent that media files are supported on your Palm device and through a process of export, then copy and paste.

hey all.... I just made the leap and tried to figure it all out along the way.

Gordon's Tech Spot has a lot of great ideas as he has made the migration before you. http://tech.kateva.org/2008/08/palm-to-iphone-migration-now-address.html

For Tasks: I bought Toodledo for $4 from the Apps Store. It has an import from Palm option. It worked well.
For Calender The long, but free migration goes: export to Date Book Archive (.dba). Import into Yahoo Calender. Export from Yahoo Calender to .csv format. Import into Google Calender. Make an account on Neuvasync and synchronise Google Calender and iPhone.
For Contacts: Was a bit of work, but again, free. Export a single record from Google Address Book to CSV format so that you know how the fields stack up. Then export your Palm Address Book to csv format. Bring both up in Excel, rename the field heading in your address book export so that they are recognized by Google (e.g. Business Phone rather than Phone). Then clean up your entries. Synchronize Google Address Book with iPhone via Neuvasync.
Memos with security: er.... not there yet..... but there are lots of options in the apps store.

I would love to get an Iphone. But like most here I've been using the Palm software for all my contact information since it came out. I use my computer as the main source of all my contacts and sync with my Treo 680. I should one day figure out how to sync it with my entourage, but that's a separte issuce. So it's appears there is NO easy way to get all my palm contacts (and I only use my palm Desktop 4.2.2 for contact infor) uploaded onto a Iphone??? And once it's on the IPhone how will I maintaine it?

thanks in advance.

You do not 'upload' contacts stored on a Palm device or in the Palm Desktop to an iPhone.

You export your Palm Desktop contacts as a vCard file, import that vCard file into the Address Book application that ships along with OS X, and use iTunes to synchronize your iPhone with the Address Book. That part is simple, as is the similar process for exporting events as a vCal file, importing them into iCal then again using iTunes to synchronize events with iCal.

It's everything else stored on your Palm device or in the Palm Desktop—typically tasks and memos—which are not readily transfered from one environment to the other.

I have been doing some testing on exporting memos from Palm Desktop 4.2.1.

I found that I could export a single memo in palm format, open it in Tex-Edit Plus (or whatever text editor you prefer), save as rtf (making sure to use the .rtf in the filename).

I have Air Sharing installed on my iPhone and with this I can mount the iPhone as a drive on my Mac's desktop.

By saving the rtf file on my mounted iPhone I can open it with Air Sharing and it retains it's formatting.

Now if some genius could write a batch program to do that for all my memos using the first line as the filename the job would be done.

Any takers?

michael or others, can you elaborate on how to export the vcal file (the calendar from palm desktop) and import to the iphone? that's the only step stopping me from going to iphone...

somebody recommended me to use isync 2.x, what do you think? if it is a good choice, would you mind telling me how to do it?

since this is a one time thing, i don't want to spend any money for the transfer if possible. many thanks.

michael or others, can you elaborate on how to export the vcal file (the calendar from palm desktop) and import to the iphone? that's the only step stopping me from going to iphone...

somebody recommended me to use isync 2.x, what do you think? if it is a good choice, would you mind telling me how to do it?

since this is a one time thing, i don't want to spend any money for the transfer if possible. many thanks.

As an alternative to using Air Sharing, you could try using a dedicated 3rd party notes app. I am the co-author of one such app, Notespark. We have a Palm Desktop importer (beta, but no known problems) that should import all your Palm memos in one shot. (The importer is part of our website, which syncs with the iPhone app). We tried hard to make it pretty simple.

I believe there are others apps that support importing Palm memos in various ways, too.

Is there an APP in AppStore that allows you to make some contacts private? The TREO does this.