How To Sync Android Smartphones (Samsung Galaxy Tab) Using Linux

In reality, you can’t really synchronize android to any desktop OS. Its cloud based storage of PIM data can be synchronized with google or evolution via internet. You can mount the phone as a generic storage device to transfer files to and from the sd card (so that’ll work in linux too, obviously) but there is no program for syncing anything to your pc. all syncing is done on the cloud – i.e. you sync with gmail and other google apps (all your mobile phone numbers are stored on google contacts, for example), your facebook account and all of the other service and apps that you use.

Hints for an “in house” Linux solution

Music

The Rhythmbox media player and totally supports disk-based syncing. It also includes the features you would expect in a modern media player including CD ripping, playlists, podcast downloading and support for Internet radio. Rhythmbox will play virtually any audio format as it’s based on the popular GStreamer media framework. It will even transfer music from an iPod, although you’ll still have the DRM issue should those tunes carry that stigma.
Banshee is strongly tied to the GNOME desktop manager. These two together make managing your Android phone music as simple as it gets. Now, Banshee is not a complete replacement for iTunes. There is no way to purchase music through Banshee (which is fine because most Android phones can purchase music straight from the Amazon MP3 market). But Banshee does a bang up job of managing your music – and a simple job interacting with the Android phone. Now, let’s take a look at how this is done

Contacts and Calendar via gmail cloud

I sync contacts and calendar between the android phone and linux pc via gmail. I use Evolution or thunderbird as a linux client for accessing  and sync-ing contacts and calendar with gmail. the android phone syncs wtih gmail easily.

Some guys claimed that sync the  contacts with a  Nokia using SyncML and that I believe IS available on the Android platform

Simple and Bridged approaches

I have windows (XP or 7) installed on VirtualBox at a linux system (ubuntu and fedora 15). Both My Phone Explorer and Android Sync Manager (Wifi) work well. At the end of day, we still need a bit of windows in our linux village.   This takes care of contacts, calendar, sms, call log etc.

the memo on android is a nice tool too. I haven’t find a easy way to synchronise with PC. I reply on Samsung Kies to sync memo with outlook notes.

As a non-perfect way, Note Everything can import palm Memo and outlook Notes when they are exported as required format

PalmNote  is alternative to import palm Memo