New Motorola v180 Cell Phone
A couple of months ago I accidentally dropped my cell phone into the toilet. That was a couple of days after it took a bath in Pepsi overnight when a cup leaked in my car (it survived this one just fine). Needless to say the poor phone was not in working order. That’s not quite true. I could turn it on, and if I timed it just right I could make a call to one of my speed dial numbers. If I didn’t, it would power down, reset itself, power back up again giving me another 5 second window to attempt the call. Because of all of the issues with the van, I held off replacing it (I really don’t make that many call on it). So I finally broke down this past weekend and purchased a Motorola V180 phone.
One of the features of the phone is that it has USB jack on it. With the right software, you can sync your contacts, load pictures, ring tones, and media files, and even use it as a modem for your computer. Because I’m a basic phone kind of guy, all I really wanted to do was to load my contacts out of Microsoft Outlook so that I didn’t have to type everything in by hand. After playing around for way too long I gave up on the free tools for the PC and switched my efforts to the Mac.
Even thought the v180 is not listed as a supported phone, Apple’s iSync works great with the phone right out of the box. iSync will sync my contacts from Apple’s Address Book to the phone’s memory (not the SIM card), it would also sync my calendar if I wanted.
The biggest challenge was now how to get my contacts out of Microsoft Outlook 2003 on the PC and into my Mac’s Address Book. Google to the rescue. After a quick search, I found an Address Book Importer. The importer takes a tab-delimited file and imports the contents into the Address Book. I exported my contacts out of Outlook (in tab-delimited format), used the tool to import. Oops, it appears that the export from Outlook was messed up (it didn’t export cleanly in tab-delimited format). OK, second try. This time I did the export to CSV (comma separated values); imported that file into Excel; saved as tab-delimited; and used the Address Book Importer. It worked great. To make things a little neater, I put all the imported addresses into a special group and only synced that group.
March 31, 2005 at 8:38 am
I wonder if your experimentation with the durability of this product and its results could be sold for a profit. Certainly you would cost the compnay a whole lot less than the PhDs in their lab. Also, another upside is that there is not teacher like experience. (I hope it is not too early in the am for humor.)
How is the new phone working?
April 11, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Where did you get your USB cable? Motorola has them for $50, other sites online have them cheaper, but a lot of those sites feel a little sketchy.
April 11, 2005 at 1:04 pm
I used the cable off of my USB card reader. The connection is a mini USB Plug type B 5-pin cable. I just did a quick search on