Ubuntu is launching a cloud-based contacts sync service. I'll let them explain:

Hello fellow Ubuntu One users!

I'm excited to finally be writing this email. For over a year now, the team has
been working on an address book contacts synchronization service that will
raise the bar for what's currently available on Linux desktops.

Getting contacts on CouchDB and replicating between desktops and the cloud was
the first big step. The second, and much bigger step, is to actually get those
contacts from and to mobile phones. To achieve this, we have partnered with a
company called Funambol[1], who share our views on open source, and have an
established a proven software stack that synchronizes thousands of mobile
phones and other devices. They have built a community around different client
plugins, virtually supporting the majority of the existing software on all
platforms that have contacts (Thunderbird, Outlook, Mac OS X Mail, etc). We are
excited to be working with them.

Due to the costs of implementing the Funambol server, the phone synchronization
service will only be part of Ubuntu One paid plans. But everyone (free and paid
users) will have the opportunity to try the service and get all of their
contacts onto their desktop for free with a 30-day trial!. The 30 days will
only start counting once Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is released at the end of April.

More information about the mobile contacts synchronization service can be found
at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/PhoneSync/FAQ

Right now we're at a stage where we feel confident opening up the service for
wider testing. We strongly recommend that you have a backup of your contacts
since we've only tested with a hand-full of phone models at this point.

We're still ramping up our servers to support new record level loads, so we
expect the next week or two to be a bit bumpy. We should have these
infrastructure improvements ready before the Lucid release.

All of the information to start testing is available at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/PhoneSync/

No matter how successful or unsuccessful the mobile contacts synchronization is
for you, we would like to ask everyone to please fill out the test cases. They
are critical to improving this new service for everyone.

At this point of testing, we favor IRC chats (freenode, #ubuntuone) and replies
on this mailing list rather than creating new bugs in Launchpad. We would feel
better if the developers filed the bugs with the proper debugging information
rather than having dozens of bugs we can't act on. This will change in the near
future, but for this stage, it's easier for us.

Thank you! We look forward to getting your testing results.

[1] http://www.funambol.com/

--

Martin and The Ubuntu One Team

_______________________________________________
Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuone-users
Post to : ubuntuone-users@lists.launchpad.net

The N900 is not currently in the supported phones under Nokia list, but I selected the N97 and used the user/pass to try and sync using SyncEvolution on my phone. It currently fails with status 401. I've reported this bug upstream, you should have a look and announce you're affected if you're interested:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone...ol/+bug/558712

Any ideas to get around this issue would be great, I'll keep trying different settings to see if I can get it going.

Regards,

Vlad

www.nistor.co.uk

I too only discovered the service yesterday, getting the same error with syncevolution but trying to look a bit further into why.

I think that N900 will not be supported.

I have sync evolution 1.1 compiled and working on my n900, it's pretty simple to compile. Would the new version make it easier?

Perhaps not exactly on topic, I had Funambol working with the N900 not too long ago - it works in much the same way other SyncML stuff sort of works, just not quite the way you expect it will.

I stopped using it after a few days simply because it couldn't handle the entire contact card, only a small subset of it, and very poorly at that.

Although I never bothered to delve too deeply in to the configuration options for the N900, I got the impression they are different for every handset, so it's unlikely that selecting a different model will come with any success at all.

Hmm I don't get it, don't we just need to use the SyncEvolution (SyncML client) from the repos to get this working?

I will try it out and let you know what happens.

EDIT: Ah yes we still need a Funambol client which I used out a long time ago. Well, at least Ovi Suite's slowly beginning to support our baby.