Recently I’ve been working on an application that makes use of a user’s contact book. While it is simple to download the application to my physical device and test it on my own phone book, this is not so convenient for others who don’t have a physical device to test on. Also, it is a lot easier to test and test often on the emulator than to transfer the project to my ADP1 phone and then run it. Think of it as the difference between testing something in a lab and testing it ‘in the field’. While more useful, testing ‘in the field’ has a lot more overhead and should be reserved for more ‘functional’ updates to your code.
That being said, I’ve found a way to upload and sync a large contacts book to the Android emulator. The crux of the process makes use of Funambol, who “provides open source MobileWeb push email and pim sync software for billions of phones,” and their sync application for Android. To install and use this program perform the following steps [I suggest reading entire instruction set before starting]:
- Download the Funambol sync .apk file to your phone.
- Open an android emulator.
- Open the included browser in the emulator
- Navigate to https://android-client.forge.funambol.org/
- Click on “Documents & Files” under the Project Tools menu
- On the resulting screen navigate through the file structure as follows:
- Android Client (0,6) > Contrib > (0,1) > a la Mobile
-
-
Select alamobile-Funambolsync.apk [<—Or just click on this link via your emulator] and download
-
-
Install Funambol .apk file
-
Install as you would any .apk file
-
-
Setup Funambol Sync
-
Run Sync from emulator
-
-
Go to Menu > Settings
-
Enter credentials of Username: guest and password: guest
-
Click ok and click twice on contacts menu item to sync with Funambol’s sample address book. The syncing process will take a few minutes as it seeds your contact book with 300+ entries.
- If your contacts don’t show up right away go to Contacts > Menu > Display Group > All contacts.
- Have fun!
Pingback: Anonymous