Existing users, 
Funambol does slick wireless contact sync
Posted 7 November 2007 @ 3pm in Applications
Open source messaging service Funambol has a new contact management app for iPhones that’s the bee’s knees. It works both as a Web app, and a native application for users with iPhones that have been jailbroken and have the Installer.app loaded on their system. In its current state, a Funambol-registered iPhone can slurp up all your iPhone contacts, and make them available for backup, and editing online. You can then sync over the air at any time, to either recover contacts to your phone, or add news ones you’ve created using Funambol’s Web based contact manager.
In addition to contacts, the app has planned integration for calendars, to-do lists, and notes, all of which the company says should be on track for Q1 2008, as soon as Apple gives developers a higher level of access with their SDK.
To access the app, you’ve first got to go register with Funambol’s myFamambol service and setup a user name and password. After that you can either visit the Web version at http://my.funambol.com/iphone, or install the app through installer by adding Funambol’s iPhone page as a source (instructions here). Both apps do the same thing, so honestly there’s no real reason to go through the effort of installing the app locally.
For Windows users, this is a far easier solution than dealing with Outlook’s contact manager or having to bother with iTunes’ less than steller sync speed. In my testing I found it managed to sync everything over in about 15 seconds over a wi-fi connection, and about 30 over EDGE. Interestingly enough, there is another app from Zyb.com that does the exact same thing, although I prefer Funamol for avoiding the whole social networking angle and skipping straight to a simple contact manager. There’s also Plaxo Mobile Plus, but that’s not setup to run on the iPhone just yet. Expect them to launch a solution when the iPhone SDK hits.
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4 Comments
Posted by louislinfoot
7 November 2007 @ 9pm
didn’t work for me… I continually received an error that Safari could not download the file… anyone else able to get this to work?
Posted by admin
8 November 2007 @ 11am
If you’re going through Safari you don’t need to download anything. If you’re trying to download the app, you’ve got to first add Funambol as a source in Installer. It’ll then show up under “productivity” where you can download it.
Like we said in the post though, you don’t need to download it to get the same functionality. Hope this helps.
Posted by Tanc
8 November 2007 @ 3pm
I tried to use it twice to sync my contacts but it failed both times with an error 500 in the log. I was using the application version on my jailbroken iPhone.
I’m not sure if I entirely get the point of this software though. All my contacts are stored on my computer in Apple’s Address Book and sync nicely every time I charge the iPhone. I guess it would be good to have another backup online but I can easily achieve this with other software. Once the contact are in myFunambol online there is nothing I can really do with them and the interface is worse than address book or the iPhone address book so I don’t want to us it to enter contact information.
What would be useful is if myFunambol could sync my uploaded address book to my gmail address book. If it could do this then it would have some purpose. The funambol site has a lot of information on there but not a lot of it makes much sense to an iPhone user as far as I could tell as we already have a working sync option. Can someone explain the uses to me?
Posted by srekcar
8 November 2007 @ 6pm
I’m a bit lost.
I registered hoping to synch contacts in Thunderbird with my iPhone. The website states “The portal includes an address book and calendar for synchronizing contact and calendar data from popular email clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, …” However, I see no provision for synching with Thunderbird at all. On the downloads page, there are only plugins for Outlook, PocketPC, iPod and Smartphone.
Could you explain exactly what you synched and how you did it? Did you use the web page (or not), the e-mail client you synched with, plugins used, etc…
Thanks in advance.