iSync Plugins for over 100 Sony Ericsson phones
Below is some general iSync advice which can help solve occasional issues with iSync. This information applies both to phones supported natively by iSync or via an iSync Phone Plugin.
First try the quick fixes listed below, which solve most issues. If they are not successful, continue on through the rest of the tips on this page.
From experience, we have found it is best to start with a fully up-to-date Mac Address Book and iCal, and a completely empty phone. Attempting to merge existing data on the phone and the Mac isn't always successful.
If you have existing contacts on the phone, transfer them to the Mac and import them into Address Book.
Create a group in Address Book containing only the Contacts you actually need on the phone. Then open iSync, click on the icon for your phone and choose to sync only this group.
There appears to be a bug in the Apple support for some phones (K800i & K610i especially) when syncing recurring events. iSync seems to ignore the "Don't synchronize events after:" setting in iSync, meaning it will sync recurring events forever into the future, eventually filling the phones memory and failing.
If you have contacts already existing on your phone, that are not in your Mac Address Book, it is strongly recommended that you transfer them into Address Book before syncing for the first time.
(If Contacts are stored on the SIM Card, please move them to the Phone Memory first).
NOTE: If you are using Mac OS X 10.5 or later, and Bluetooth file transfers are failing, make sure you have enabled Bluetooth Sharing in the Sharing system preferences pane.
It is very important to make regular backups of your Address Book and iCal data so that in the event of something happening during a sync, you can always easily revert to the backup.
From time-to-time, you may experience issues with syncing, such as not all data syncing to or from the phone, or syncing failing before complete. There are a number of things that can cause this, and a variety of different potential fixes.
First, always make a backup of your Address Book and iCal data as described above.
See these Apple Technical Support documents:
After each of the following suggestions, try syncing again to see if your problem is resolved:
If the above steps do not resolve your problem, you will need to do some troubleshooting to determine whether your Contacts or Calendars are causing syncing to fail.
If you get a message that says:
"Connection to the phone failed. Please make sure that your phone is turned on.
If this error occurs again, please restart your phone.
Error Device [name] synchronization failed."
Please try the following:
If you get an error that says:
"There was an error pushing some changes to the phone. The synchronization may have been canceled on the phone.
Device [name] synchronization failed."
Another Bluetooth device may be interferring with the sync process. Please try the following:
You may have some corruption in one or more of your Contacts or Calendars. See above for finding out which.
Here are the recommended steps for resolving problems with syncing Contacts. After each suggestion, try syncing again to see if your issue is resolved.
If the above suggestions do not work, you may have some corrupt data in one or more of your Contacts, especially if you receive an error message similar to this in your iSync Log:
Conduit Address Book generated exception NSInternalInconsistencyException: Type of value {
identifiers = (”005CB3CB-945D-11D9-935D-00112479516E”);
labels = (”_$!!$_”);
primaryIdentifier = “005CB3CB-945D-11D9-935D-00112479516E”;
values = ();
} does not match property ‘Phone’ type 257. Can’t commit item EC776A4A-91ED-11D9-82C9-00112479516E:ABPerson.
This error means there is a problem with the phone record of person “EC776A4A-91ED-11D9-82C9-00112479516E:ABPerson.” which doesn't really help much.
John Morgan has written a small utility, ABFinder, which will let you identify which contact this error refers to, by entering the long alphanumeric string into the ABFinder window. You can then remove or replace the corrupted data and try syncing again.
ABFinder is freeware and available with a help file from here .
You can also try syncing a small number of Contacts in a Group, and progressively adding more and more Contacts to the group and syncing each time.
Here are the recommended steps for resolving problems with syncing Calendars. After each suggestion, try syncing again to see if your issue is resolved.
If the above suggestions do not work, it is likely you have some corrupt data in one or more of your Calendars.
To rectify this, you first need to identify which calendar(s):
If the Time Zone and Daylight Savings settings are not correct in your phone, you may experience the following:
This is not a problem with your Mac or phone, and is easily fixed. In your phone go to Settings ▸ Time & date and then adjust the Time zone and Daylight saving settings. You may need to experiment with the combination of settings until you find one that works.
Newer Sony Ericsson phones have a My time zone menu option in the Time & date section. Choose this and scroll down past all the GMT options and find the city nearest to your current location. This will automatically set the Daylight saving settings correctly.
When the clocks change in March or October, just change the Daylight saving setting in your phone and re-sync.
Please note, that any events before the last clocks change and after the next clock change will be out by one hour. This is a limitation in the way iSync and Sony Ericsson phones handle the clocks changing.
When syncing lots of Calendar events from iCal, or a long way into the future, you may get the following error:
The phone calendar is full.
Please delete some calendar events on your phone or change the filtering options and synchronize again.
This occurs because you have reached the limit of the phones memory reserved for Calendars & Contacts.
The phone does not use the free memory that you can see in the phones internal memory or on the memory stick.
There is no way to change this unfortunately. The only workaround is to reduce the number of calendars you are syncing, or narrow the timeframe that you are syncing.
iSync does not support syncing new Contacts created on the phone back into the group selected for syncing. There is no equivalent 'Put contacts created on phone into:' option like there is for Events in iSync. We filed this as a bug report to Apple in 2006 and it was already a duplicate filing, but it has never been fixed. Apple engineering say this "issue is still being investigated".
As a result, any new Contacts created on the phone will be synced to the All group. You can then drag them into any other group in Address Book as required.
To quickly identify new contacts synced from the phone, create a new Smart Group named something like "Recent" which matches the following criteria:
Card | has changed in | 1 | day and then check the Highlight group when updated checkbox.
iSync does not sync any data to or from the SIM card. Any Contacts that are on the SIM that you want to sync should be moved into the phone memory by choosing Contacts ▸ Options ▸ Advanced ▸ Copy from SIM ▸ Copy all
If a contact in Address Book does not have both the first and last name entered, iSync will substitute the missing name data with dots or dashes when synced to the phone. This applies to both normal Contacts and those designated as a Company in Address Book.
If the contact has a First or Last name with a space in it, such as Mary Lou Smith or John Davies Jones, iSync will automatically hyphenate the name so that it knows where to split the single Name field when syncing back into separate First and Last name fields. i.e Mary-Lou Smith and John Davies-Jones in the example.
Please see the following Apple Support document:
This can occur if the SyncServices database or preferences becomes corrupted. The first thing to try is to click Reset Sync History... in iSync's preferences. If that doesn't resolve it, try the following:
If that still doesn't resolve the issue in Mac OS X 10.5.x and 10.6.x, try the following.
If you have added custom ringtones, speed dials or pictures to a contacts details on the phone, this information may be wiped the next time the contact is synced. There are two reasons for this:
Unfortunately, there is nothing that we can do about this. It affects all phones, not just Sony Ericsson models.
If you have deleted iSync or your copy has become corrupted, you may need to re-install it.
You have three options for doing this:
1) Restore iSync from your Time Machine backup (or any other backup you've made).
2) Copy a fresh, unmodified version of iSync from another Mac running the same version of Mac OS X.
3) Re-install iSync from the original Mac OS X Installation Disks by following the instructions below:
Open iSync and click once on the icon for your phone. Click the More Options... button at the bottom of the window that expands. You can now adjust the timeframe of events synced from one month in the past and up to one year in the future.
Please note that these settings do not apply to Birthdays or other repeating/recurring events.