Configuring the w880i with a mac

Well I brought the phone, I am now the owner of the new super slim w880i phone from Sony Ericsson.

My next challange was to get the contacts from my Windows Mobile 5 powered Orange SPV M3100, my initial thought was to use bluetooth and transfer all the contacts by selecting them all and sending them to the new phone.

  1. WM5 does not allow you to select more than one contact
  2. WM5 does not sync with a Mac without other software (Missing Sync)
  3. Will the w880i sync with the Mac, its not on the supported list for iSync

To get around this issue I had to resort to using a Microsoft Operating system, the steps involved were as follows

  1. Create a new user on the Windows Machine
  2. Install Outlook (full edition, came with the M3100
  3. Install ActiveSync
  4. Syncronise the M3100 with this Windows Machine
  5. Install the Sony Ericsson software for syncing the w880i
  6. Syncronise the w880i with the Windows Machine

Now I have a new phone with all my contacts on, this was now the time I returned to the Mac to get the phone syncronised and interacting with my main machine.

The phone 'Paired' with no issues but when I launced iSync the device w880i was not allowed to sync.

I went of in search for other people that had had a similar problem (I thought there must be more people in the same situation). The site I found is here, your phone may be listed or not, but its simple to follow the instructions and create a new profile to be placed in the /Library/PhoneProfiles directory on the mac, you can get my profile for the w880i from this zip file

Once I had installed the above file, I was able to use iSync to syncronise the w880i and my mac address book.

The last bit of the puzzle for me was to connect the Walkman phone to iTunes, I did this by using this piece of software iTuneMyWalkman

One last syncronisation of my various playlists and my new phone has all my contacts and my tunes on. I have now replaced my iPod nano and M3100 with this new w880i phone, a phone just larger than my iPod nano, but a lot smaller than the M3100.