Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Your Sonim XP5800 Won’t Delete Contacts

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

It’s really annoying when your Sonim phone won’t let you delete contacts. Oh, you can delete some, just not the ones you want. I finally got fed up enough that I figured out how to do this.

Navigate to applications

First you need to navigate to the applications menu.

Now navigate to Backup and Restore

Next navigate to the Backup and Restore app.

Choose Backup

Choose backup. You will need to have an SD card installed because that is where backups get written.

Now you need to have your phone connected to a computer and file transfer enabled. The backup is found here.

contactbackup

The file name will be “contactbackup.” Make a copy then use your favorite text editor (not a word processor) to edit the vcard data file. If you’ve never seen one of these text files, they are ugly.

vcard data

Each “card” is bounded by BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD. The format of the N: line is last;first and God only knows after that. Not every contact manager will support all of the vcard tags. You can find a list of them here.

When you have made all of the changes you want, save the file. Now comes the non-obvious part.

On the phone choose restore.

You can’t delete that stuff, but the restore option can. If you find you made some kind of typo simply edit the backup file and restore again.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.