iSync with LG Chocolate 3? Help?

[absurdio]

So, I just picked up the LG Chocolate 3 for Verizon.
It's not on the iSync compatibility list, nor does it seem to be supported by Missing Sync (not that I'm even sure Missing Sync is exactly the kind of thing I'd need here).

I like the phone quite a bit, but I'd love it if i could use it with iSync.

In a best case scenario, I'd be able to sync up contacts and calendars. I don't count on that, though. Even just being able to sync contacts would leave me pleased as punch.

Anyone got any ideas? I know all the best Mac users have iPhones now, and I wish I could afford one (the particulars of canceling my existing contract, switching carriers, etc. would be prohibitively costly). But I can't.

So. Any help?
I had no trouble setting the phone up with Bluetooth Setup Assistant (it comes up as LG VX8560), and I can even send files to the phone via Bluetooth (about time, Verizon!). Still, when I try to add the device to iSync, it says only "This device is not supported by iSync."

Sigh.

 

[absurdio]

Well, three hours later, an update... to myself and anyone else in this conundrum:

Bitpim is the answer.
This review calls Bitpim "one of the coolest, cheapest (freeware), easiest, ugliest apps available to Mac users with cell phones."

That it certainly is. It's not pretty, but I've now got all my Address Book contacts synced (via Bluetooth) to my Chocolate 3.

It involves a bit of not-entirely-intuitive fiddling, but it works.
If anyone wants to hear the particulars of how to set up Address Book contacts via bitpim, let me know.

I haven't tried syncing iCal yet. Maybe tomorrow. But contacts worked perfectly.

Also, on an exciting note: Object Exchange via bluetooth works beautifully. I can send pictures and mp3s between my phone and computer with no trouble at all. I love it.

 

[hiloart]

need help with this!

I tried to no avail to download the bitpim.. I have a OSX 10.5.5 any info would be soooo helpful. thanks! (I'm trying to synch my ical to my phone!)
thanks!
michelle

 

[absurdio]

I tried to no avail to download the bitpim.. I have a OSX 10.5.5 any info would be soooo helpful. thanks! (I'm trying to synch my ical to my phone!)
thanks!
michelle

To download bitpim, go to bitpim.org (or click the link in my previous post), then click (or scroll down) to "Download." I'm using the "BitPim Test Release 1.0.7.20080908." Once you click on that (or on whatever version is appropriate to you), it oughtta download the disk image. That'll mount to your desktop. Bitpim is on it.

As far as syncing with iCal goes: I did manage to get some calendar events from iCal onto my phone, but it took a sortof clumsy series of steps. Unfortunately, this really isn't quite like iSync, where you push one button and all the work is done. There may be a better, more elegant way to do it than the way I went about it. I'd be happy to hear about it if anyone's got a better approach.

That said, what I did was:
1) In iCal, select one of your calendars from the list to the left, then go to File -> Export. Save the calendar somewhere. As far as I can tell, there isn't a way to export ALL your calendars at once. So you've gotta repeat this for each of your calendars.
2)In BitPim, go to File -> Import -> iCalendar... and pick one of the files you just saved from iCal. Then, repeat that for each of the ical calendars you want to import.
3)Click the "Send Phone Data" button in BitPim.

Like I said, that'll work...but not too elegantly. If your ical changes frequently (mine does), i think the nuisance of exporting a bunch of things from ical, importing them into bitpim, and sending them to the phone might be greater than the benefit of having your calendar events on your phone. It might be possible to design an Automator workflow for this... but I'm not sure I'm the one to do it.

y'know, i'd prefer isync support...

Anyway, good luck. Hope that helps someone.

 

[r88my]

Check out Novamedia phone plugins for isync. As the name suggests they do isync plugins for alot of 3rd party phones. Used them for my nokia phones before I got an iphone. Costs around £10 from what I remember.

 

[absurdio]

Check out Novamedia phone plugins for isync. As the name suggests they do isync plugins for alot of 3rd party phones. Used them for my nokia phones before I got an iphone. Costs around £10 from what I remember.

Damn. That sounded awfully promising. not only is the chocolate 3 not one of their 200 supported phones, though, but they also don't support ANY LG phones. Not sure why that is.

Anyway, I sent 'em off an email, requesting support for the chocolate 3. Here's hoping...

 

[mkrishnan]

I think the answer to the "why" question is that LG doesn't really provide the infrastructure for computer syncing on their side.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1186163&tstart=0

I don't even think most of these phones have syncing capacities on Windows. I think it's a shame, because from time to time, LG phones look really good. A while ago I was dating a girl who had an enV and loved it.

 

[absurdio]

I think the answer to the "why" question is that LG doesn't really provide the infrastructure for computer syncing on their side.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1186163&tstart=0

I don't even think most of these phones have syncing capacities on Windows. I think it's a shame, because from time to time, LG phones look really good. A while ago I was dating a girl who had an enV and loved it.

Crumbs.

Thanks for the link, mkrishnan. You're right. There doesn't seem to be LG support much of anywhere. On any platform. Again: crumbs.

The really frustrating thing is that since you CAN get these things to work in SOME capacity via BitPim, it seems like it wouldn't take a whole lot of software tinkering to get it to just work smoothly, y'know?

What a frustrating position to be in. It's times like this, I wish I had any of the requisite technical know-how...

 

[polycat33]

It involves a bit of not-entirely-intuitive fiddling, but it works.
If anyone wants to hear the particulars of how to set up Address Book contacts via bitpim, let me know.

Were you able to put ringtones and wallpapers onto the phone in this way as well? If so I'd like to hear how. More info about the "fiddling" would be appreciated. I've used Bitpim before so it's not new to me, but I'm having problems getting it to detect my phone at all, and I've never used anything but the filesystem browsing.

 

[absurdio]

Were you able to put ringtones and wallpapers onto the phone in this way as well? If so I'd like to hear how. More info about the "fiddling" would be appreciated. I've used Bitpim before so it's not new to me, but I'm having problems getting it to detect my phone at all, and I've never used anything but the filesystem browsing.

Sorry for the long delay and for what's about to be a pretty unhelpful response. No, so far I haven't gotten ringtones or wallpapers onto the phone. On my old phone, I sent myself ringtones using myxertones. On this phone, that doesn't work. While I can send myself .mp3s over bluetooth file exchange, I can't find any way to make them my ringtones. I also got some clip (that I had been trying to use as a ringtone) to appear under "My Sounds" instead of "My Music," but that didn't get me any closer to using it as a ringtone.

I'll toy around with Bitpim some more, but it sounds like you're probably more familliar with it than i am.

As far as getting Bitpim to connect to the phone: 1) I started by using Apple's "Set up Bluetooth Device," which worked fine. 2) To my great chagrin, I can't seem to connect more than one bluetooth gizmo at a time. That is, if my bluetooth mouse is connected, then my computer (through Bitpim or otherwise) won't acknowledge my phone.

I'll post back once I've figured anything out about ringtones (or failed to completely). Let me know if you have any breakthroughs on that front...

 

[absurdio]

Okay. So. That took about five minutes.

I've sent myself a proof-of-concept ringtone, and it works fine.

Bitpim: Go to the Media section on the left, select "ringers." Then click the "Add ringer" button at the top (music note with a plus sign). Select a .mid file (that's what I used, anyway; I don't know if other formats work). That file shows up in the "ringers" section of Bitpim. Click the "Send phone data" button at the top. Make sure your phone's bluetooth is on.
That's it.

I should add that for reasons I know nothing about, this process also restarted my phone. That might worry me, but when it restarted, the file I'd just sent myself was avaliable in "my ringtones," and now it IS my ringtone. so. *shrug* no harm done, i guess.

good luck.

 

[croe67]

It involves a bit of not-entirely-intuitive fiddling, but it works.
If anyone wants to hear the particulars of how to set up Address Book contacts via bitpim, let me know.

I would love to know.....I tried with bitpim & my chocolate 3 a couple months back to no avail. I uninstalled bitpim & have been stuck with no way to update my phone.

so, I would be REALLY grateful if you could tell me HOW you got it to work, because I know the obvious way didn't work for me.

THANKS!!

 

[absurdio]

I would love to know.....I tried with bitpim & my chocolate 3 a couple months back to no avail. I uninstalled bitpim & have been stuck with no way to update my phone.

so, I would be REALLY grateful if you could tell me HOW you got it to work, because I know the obvious way didn't work for me.

THANKS!!

Hey croe67. I'm not sure exactly what the trouble is. I'll help as best I can, though I'm less of an expert than this thread makes me seem. Are you trying to connect via bluetooth or via usb? A few people have contacted me asking how to get the USB connection to work. The answer is: I have no idea, and it may not be possible. Every time I tried that, I got an incessant error message. If that's "the obvious way," then that oughtta fix the problem. Use bluetooth. If not, I'll post more on the addressbook/bitpim process as soon as I'm not also trying to get an overdue essay done.

 

[croe67]

Ok....so I re-downloaded it - the newer trial version & managed to get it to work after messing with it a bit. This is a newer version than was available last time I tried & that seemed to make the difference, but still took some time, a bitpim freeze-ups, a few re-starts & random error messages "Phone not responding while transitioning from none to brew". But, with a re-start of the phone & the mac, that seemed to go away.

Bummer that the only option is to write over the contacts on the phone, as it also does away with the picture & ringtone links to each contact when it overwrites them. So, I don't think I'll be doing it too often....hoping isync adds support for this phone sometime soon, as that's a much better tool that doesn't just over-write everything each time.

But I am glad that I figured out how to get it to work!

 

[Hunts121]

Were you able to put ringtones and wallpapers onto the phone in this way as well? If so I'd like to hear how. More info about the "fiddling" would be appreciated. I've used Bitpim before so it's not new to me, but I'm having problems getting it to detect my phone at all, and I've never used anything but the filesystem browsing.

I've transferred music, wallpaper, nearly everything (except ringtones) over to the chocolate by simply using the bluetooth file exchange program built into OSX. For ringtones I've had to use bitpim but that is usually a pain free process

I will say that transferring music over bluetooth is rather slow though lol

 

[DistantThunder]

If anyone wants to hear the particulars of how to set up Address Book contacts via bitpim, let me know.

I would be very interested in hearing the details. I used BitPim with my previous phone, a Samsung model, and it worked great. But no such luck with my Chocolate 3.

I've installed BitBim 1.0.7, but the phone detection consistently fails.

What port are you using?

 

[osxrulz]

Okay. So. That took about five minutes.

I've sent myself a proof-of-concept ringtone, and it works fine.

Bitpim: Go to the Media section on the left, select "ringers." Then click the "Add ringer" button at the top (music note with a plus sign). Select a .mid file (that's what I used, anyway; I don't know if other formats work). That file shows up in the "ringers" section of Bitpim. Click the "Send phone data" button at the top. Make sure your phone's bluetooth is on.
That's it.

I should add that for reasons I know nothing about, this process also restarted my phone. That might worry me, but when it restarted, the file I'd just sent myself was avaliable in "my ringtones," and now it IS my ringtone. so. *shrug* no harm done, i guess.

good luck.

What did you use to convert to .mid? Or was it an existing file? I have an mp3 I used to use on my RAZR that I would like to add to my new Chocolate 3 (of course SourceForge is currently down, so I can't even download bitpim at the moment).

I have QuickTime Pro... anyone know if the phone will accept .3gp files as ringtones using bitpim?

EDIT: Of course shortly after I post my message SourceForge comes back online, so I was able to download bitpim.
FWIW - It seems to convert files to mp3. I now have my Star Wars "Imperial March" (Darth Vader theme) ringtone set for my boss once again

 

[Cymothoe]

I've stumbled upon a weird workaround for this one.

At first I was syncing single songs and small video files via bluetooth, but my bluetooth is acting real shady recently and it's hard to hold onto a connection long enough to be really useful. Plus, it's slow.

I downloaded Bitpim but quickly got fed up with the UI and its constant crashing, so I booted up my virtual XP machine in VirtualBox (if you don't already have a virtual machine, you'll have to decide whether it's worth setting one up just to sync with your phone. There are certainly other instances in which it's come in handy to have a small Windows OS as a backup) and downloaded VCast with Rhapsody. After enabling USB devices in the VB settings, you'll be able to virtually "plug in" your phone and sync it just fine through VCast.

However, running your files through the virtual machine is slow and cumbersome, since you first need to get them from your Mac onto your virtual hard drive, either through a shared network folder or online file hosting or whatever. Also VCast is a stupid program.

So the next time I plugged in my phone and the quickstart Verizon menu came up, I selected the option to load the USB mass storage device (i.e., the microSD card in my phone) rather than open VCast. I looked and looked through the file systems on the PC but could not find the drive anywhere. Where it ended up being, weirdly enough, was on my Mac's desktop.

And it functions just as it should, quickly and natively.

 

[bbbbb]

Add Phonebook

How do you get your contacts onto the computer?
Could I please get a more detailed description
Thanks!
ps. I have the LG Rumor

 

[bbbbb]

Well, three hours later, an update... to myself and anyone else in this conundrum:

Bitpim is the answer.
This review calls Bitpim "one of the coolest, cheapest (freeware), easiest, ugliest apps available to Mac users with cell phones."

That it certainly is. It's not pretty, but I've now got all my Address Book contacts synced (via Bluetooth) to my Chocolate 3.

It involves a bit of not-entirely-intuitive fiddling, but it works.
If anyone wants to hear the particulars of how to set up Address Book contacts via bitpim, let me know.

I haven't tried syncing iCal yet. Maybe tomorrow. But contacts worked perfectly.

Also, on an exciting note: Object Exchange via bluetooth works beautifully. I can send pictures and mp3s between my phone and computer with no trouble at all. I love it.

How do you get your contacts onto the computer?
Could I please get a more detailed description
Thanks!
ps. I have the LG Rumor