A reader of this blog recently contacted me to get some help with getting his new HTC Touch Diamond working with ZYB. It took me three weeks to reply (I was away on holiday, so far away that they didn’t even have broadband) and when I finally replied, I told him that I didn’t have a solution unfortunately. He then wrote back to me telling me that he had been in touch with ZYB customer support who had directed him to a solution! Now my ZYB contacts and calendar is in sync with my HTC Touch Diamond…

On July 12th, Jesper Amtkjær Møller contacted me via e-mail asking me if I had been able to find the synchronization menu on the HTC Touch Diamond, as he couldn’t find it. He, like many others, wanted to synchronize his new phone with ZYB. I hadn’t had time to have a look at it before I left for my holiday, so when I came back I started looking into it.

I looked around a bit and it turns out that there is no synchronization menu (no SyncML client) built into the Windows Mobile platform (I’m guessing Microsoft has developed their own private protocol and hasn’t bothered to support SyncML). I looked around and the best free option seemed to be the Funambol project but I had no luck using their client. So I did it manually, i.e. downloading each of the contacts that I use on a regular basis from ZYB and transferred them via Bluetooth to the HTC Touch Diamond. I also wrote Jesper telling him the bad news…

But in the time it had taken me to reply to Jesper, he had already contacted ZYB support asking them for assistance! Here’s their reply:

…Your phone is a Windows based mobile. Please note that this phone requires a 3rd party client in order to be compatible with ZYB. Below we include a link to such a 3rd party client. However, we cannot take responsibility for this client as the application is not developed by us. Please only use it if you trust the provider we are linking to.
Please go to this link http://www.synthesis.ch/dl_client.php?lang=e and download the trial version of this client. 

Here are the settings which you need to set up the third party client with ZYB:
1. Username: Your ZYB username
2. Password: Your ZYB password
3. Server Address: http://sync.zyb.com/
4. Contacts Data base Address: contacts
5. Calendar Data base Address: calendar
Thank you for your patience and cooperation.

ZYB plan to launch it own client later this year. If you are interested in possibly getting a beta version of this client then you can apply to be part of the User Team. For a unique insight into the future development of ZYB, please send your details to userteam@zyb.com. Thank you for using ZYB. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Best Regards,

Customer Support
ZYB

So I did and it works absolutely perfect! So I now have both contacts and calendar synchronized – haven’t had any luck with the tasks yet, though. But now to the bad news: The client ZYB is referring to is not freeware. The reason I have everything synchronized is that there is a free 30-day trial. This is the best solution I have found (or rather, Jesper found), so I’m just hoping that I don’t receive any new phone numbers 30 days from now…

Again, thanks to Jesper Amtkjær Møller for the tip – I can see on my Google Analytics that this is a hot topic at the moment, so I hope this will be helpful for all of you searching for this. At least it’s a way to get all your contacts over in the first place.