BitPIM rocks, finally!

I have a LG VX-4600, a slick phone, but short-lived in LG’s product line. It only sold online for a short time.

I picked up a USB/Serial cable for it and downloaded BitPIM, an application that lets you import/export data from Outlook into BitPIM, manipulate files on the phone through an Explorer-type interface, and transfer files from BitPIM to the phone. I’ve been trying to get it working for months, but BitPIM didn’t fully support the -4600 and I only had middling success. One big show-stopper: Palm Desktop, which I always have running in the background seems to affect the USB serial cable, even though they’re not sharing port address or IRQ. If you get a “port exists but is not available” message from BitPIM, look for active devices sitting on a COM port.

Now, I have all of my Outlook contacts in the “phone” category downloaded to my phone, critical circuit IDs, support procedures and passwords saved in my phone’s notebook, appointments saved in the calendar, and a cool Quake ][ logo for my wallpaper. A nice feature is that I can download the telephone logs to the PC, in case anyone ever complains that I never called them back when actually, they never called (happens some times, especially when something goes wrong at night…)

So, here’s the procedure.

1. Get a USB/serial cable and install drivers.
2. download BitPIM (The current version is 0.8.04)
3. Plug the cable into the PC, plug the phone into the cable, then turn the phone off and back on again.
4. In BitPIM, go to edit->settings and tell BitPIM you have a LG VX-4500. The -4600 setting is only for a Telus Mobility phone.

Once in BitPIM, you can download PIM information (Contacts, phone log, SMS log, notepad and schedule) from the phone, access phone-specific data (wallpapers and ring tones), browse the phone filesystem, import Outlook information, save it in BitPIM, edit it, and upload it back to the phone.

The notepad fields are quite small, but I was able to break up larger Outlook Notes into smaller logical bits to fit.

Very cool. With this I can leave my pager and Palm Pilot at home and carry all the on-call information I need with me in my telephone.