Hello,
My wife wants to get a smartphone, and she'd like to be able to sync her calendar and contacts between the smartphone and KDE Pim. I am her tech support. What smartphone would you recommend? We are in the U.S.A. She currently subscribes to AT&T, but may be willing to switch if necessary. I am partial to Android, but will consider anything that syncs calendar and contact items. Syncing is her primary requirement. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Bill W

Hello Bill,

This has been a long-time requirement of mine but hadn't really been possible with my Symbian phone, at least not on Linux.

I got my first Android phone last week, a ZTE Blade ('Orange San Francisco' in the UK). You'll find support in Android forums and at http://android.modaco.com/category/453/ ... odaco-com/ and http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=906.

Anyway, to your question - these steps only relate to Android phones, I can't comment on other platforms.

You need a Google Account (a pre-requisite with Android) and once logged into this your Android phone will sync contacts and calendar with it.

On your computer install akonadi-kde-resource-googledata using your package manager - kpackagekit, synaptic etc.

Now start Akonadi Resources Configuration (alt-f2 and search for akonadi) then add resources for both Akonadi Google Contacts and Akonadi Google Calendar, you will be prompted for your Google username and password.

Once you've configured the Akonadi resources you will (probably) need to add them to Contacts and Calendar in Kontact.

After this the new calendar/contacts resources will be synced with the phone via the Google Account.

Hopefully I've gone into enough detail - based on my experience of a week or so it seems to work well. If you have questions just post them here and I'll do what I can to help.

Nick

Nick,
Thank you very much, your reply is very helpful. I think I get the picture: Android syncs to Google cloud, then Google cloud syncs to KDE PIM via Akonadi. Thus, it ought to work for any phone which runs a recent version of Android, I'd think.
Can you tell me if the sync can go the other way (KDE -> Google -> phone)? I'll check out the two links you included.

Best regards,
Bill W

bwayson wrote:Can you tell me if the sync can go the other way (KDE -> Google -> phone)?

Absolutely! I don't know why I was so surprised that it worked so well when I tested it, but there you go. Obviously the usual caveats apply with synchronisation especially when logged in at more than one computer/phone at the same time, but I doubt I need to tell you that - it can be difficult to predict how robust the mechanism will be at either end.

I haven't yet gone the whole hog and moved everything to the cloud but it's only a matter of time, just for now I have 2 of everything (local and cloud).

Hi,

I am very interested by this question.
I've been trying to sync my Kontact Contacts and organizer with Google contacts and calendar by different ways (remote .ics, CalDAV, GCalDaemon, and Akonadi).

From what I've seen, using Akonadi, I finally could establish a 2-ways sync between KOrganizer and Google Agenda.

The first issue I am facing is the automation of this sync: up to now, changes are applied only after right-clicking on the Akonadi-gcal ressource in Korganizer and asking for sync-ing. Is there an easier way?

Then, I might have missed something somewhere, but I barely can't sync my Kontacts and Google contacts using Akonadi. Google Contacts do appear in Kontact, but much of the information is lost (for example: professional phone number, or second email address, or birthday), and modifications entered in Kontact are not sent to Google Contact.
Thus, I was a bit surprised to read that:

annew wrote:The developers have said absolutely clearly that as far as releases are concerned, only kaddressbook is ported to akonadi. Any experiments you make with the parts you can see, that are not yet fully developed, are your own responsibility. I did try adding an akonadi calendar, but it caused freezes. I removed it. I wouldn't recommend doing this at the moment.

The developers' decision that the other modules of kdepim were not yet ready for release was not taken lightly.

(see viewtopic.php?f=20&t=87363&p=155937&hilit=kontact+google+contact#p155934)
This post is a bit old, but I was thinking that, if kaddressbook syncing with Google worked in 2010, then it should be fine in 2011...
which led me to the conclusion that something was going straight over my little head...

As you saw from that thread, it worked for some people, and not for others. I would imagine that there were a number of factors involved. Meanwhile, I understand that some people are getting very much nearer the ideal, although I don't know whether both-way-syncing is yet possible. My new phone arrived today, so I'll be experimenting over the next week or two.

ok, thanks for your reply.
as a conclusion, the Akonadi sync-ing does not work out of the box.

I guess I'll have to be less impatient