When I replaced my aging Sony Ericsson T616 with a new W810i, I did so assuming it was fully supported by OS X and Address Book. Apple’s own iSync devices page lists the phone after all. I realized yesterday that this was not true. I could not answer an incoming call by clicking “Answer” on my Mac, even though it was correctly displaying the caller’s information, nor could I dial my phone from the Address Book.
Even worse, I don’t know how many SMS messages I thought I was sending. That is one of the better integration features, not having to thumb type your text messages when you have a nice big QWERTY keyboard sitting right in front of you, attached to your Mac. I promise I’m not just being dense here. Anyone who has used this feature knows that it provides zero feedback after a message is sent, successful or not.
We’re not all jumping on the iPhone bandwagon just yet, so I went and looked for a fix. I found a link on an O’Reilly DevCenter Blog to a guy who is now charging three bucks to do it for you. Weak sauce. So I figured it out myself. I posted instructions on that blog, but figured it should be posted somewhere that I control as well. Here it is.
Quit Address Book.
Right-click on the Address Book application and Show Package Contents. Open Contents, then Resources.
Right-click on Telephony.bundle and Show Package Contents. Open Contents, then Resources inside that one as well.
Find “ABDeviceCommandSets.plist” and open it in a raw text editor. BBEdit worked for me. You can also use Apple’s developer tool, Property List Editor. But I don’t seem to have that installed on this machine, so I skipped it.
Scroll down to line 50, and copy the line which reads “<string>Z600</string>” without the quotes. I also saw strings for the T610 and T630 above this. Paste the Z600 line into the file and change “Z600″ to “W810″ — again without the quotes. The lines should look similar to this..
<array>
<string>T610</string>
<string>T630</string>
<string>Z600</string>
<string>W810</string>
</array>
Save and close. Done. My SE W810i can now be dialed from Address Book and I can send SMS messages without having to thumb-type as well.
Of course, if you don’t use Property List Editor or BBEdit, I can’t say what might happen. You are editing important configuration files here. If you don’t have either editor, you could try BareBones’s TextWrangler, which is free. Also note that this is accurate as of OS 10.4.10. Later versions of the OS may move files around or provide better support natively in the first place. Good luck!
