Comments on: Painful migration from Palm to iPhone

By: Gary

Gary — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:21:02 +0000

Does anybody have any suggestions for moving the files from an old Handspring Visor running on Palm 3.0.1 to the Iphone4?

Thanks,
Gary

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:43:31 +0000

Sorry if my post wasn’t clear. I was able to get most of the custom field info ported over OK (although it was a lot of work).

All of my use of custom fields was for email addresses and web pages – those were easily translated into “EMAIL;INTERNET” and “URL” (respectively). If you’re doing other things with the custom fields, I can’t tell how much work that would be (without knowing more details).

However, overall the migration was a nightmare. It’s done now and I’m not going back, but if I had it to do over again, I’d VERY seriously consider going to the Palm Pre instead of the iPhone.

I haven’t looked closely at the Palm Pre. It has only 8 GB of flash (compared to 16 or 32 for 3GS), but that matters only if you’re going to play music or movies from your phone (I don’t).

The Pre appears to have a more sophisticated OS (it can multitask), and MAYBE it’s better at porting stuff over from the Treo (I’d hope, but I don’t know). I hope it also has retained some of the good PDA features that the iPhone still lacks.

So for my usage, the only downside of the Pre is that it has far fewer apps available than the iPhone – but it’s new and I expect that to change quickly. In 2 years, once my AT&T contract is up, I’ll be looking closely at what Palm has.

Best of luck!

–Dave

By: Ed

Ed — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 13:49:28 +0000

I am considering going through a remarkably similar process… I use the Treo680, and it works great. The phone, though, is old, beat up, and I am itching to get an iPhone because it seems to be great. However– I want all of my information to Sync on the iPhone. I use Goldmine (by Frontrange) as my contact manager, then use a program called Companionlink which allows me to map 10+ custom fields any way I choose– it is brilliant. I think what it actually does, is map Goldmine to Palm Desktop, then Palm Desktop to Treo. As with you– I do not use Outlook.

Question: In reading your post, I remain a little confused– so, were you able to sync some of the custom fields (ie. 1-4) with iPhone? If yes, then how? If not, then what is the summary of your advice?

I greatly appreciate the feedback, as there truly is little information out there.

Thank you!