Razr V3m and iSync

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While trying to get my new Motorola Razr V3m (from Alltel) to sync my Address Book and iCal with my computer, I ran into some problems. Namely, the phone would be recognized and would be added to iSync, I could only sync Address Book entries though, iSync told me that syncing iCal to the phone was not supported.

My previous phone was a Razr V3, and I was able to sync both Address Book and iCal with it, so I didn’t really believe it wasn’t possible. After searching around the internet for a while, I ran across a solution that worked at whopack.com. It involves changing a iSync file, so make sure to create a backup of any files before you edit them (just in case).

1) Go to your Bluetooth Preferences (either by clicking on the Bluetooth icon on the top bar or through the System Preferences)

2) Click on the Devices button.

3) If you see your phone listed under the bluetooth devices box, delete it.

4) Navigate to your phone’s bluetooth menu and enter the device history.

5) If you see your computer in the list click options and then click delete. Click back to get to the Bluetooth menu. (Find Me, Handsfree, Device History, Setup)

6) If you have synced your phone previously, open iSync and remove the device.

7) Make sure iSync is closed before preceding.

8) There are two methods you can use to add iCal functionality to iSync. The first is easier and I recommend it. If the first one doesn’t work though, try the second.

  • Download MetaClasses.zip
  • Open Finder and go to Applications, find iSync.
  • Ctrl+Click and select “Show Contents”
  • Navigate down these directories
    /Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns /PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources
  • Replace MetaClasses.plist with the file you downloaded (after making a backup).

    • Proceed.

    If the above does not work for you, restore your backup of MetaClasses.plist and open the file (/Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns /PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/MetaClasses.plist)in a text editor.
    Find the line that reads: com.motorola.razorV3cVerizon
    Before that line, insert the following:

    <KEY>com.motorola.razorV3m</KEY>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>Identification</KEY>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>com.apple.gmi+gmm</KEY>
    <ARRAY>
    <STRING>Motorola CE, Copyright 2000+Motorola V3m-Sprint Phone</STRING> </ARRAY> </DICT>
    <KEY>InheritsFrom</KEY>
    <ARRAY>
    <STRING>com.motorola.usb-bt.0x22B8/0x4902</STRING> </ARRAY>
    <KEY>Services</KEY>
    <ARRAY>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>ServiceName</KEY>
    <STRING>com.apple.model</STRING>
    <KEY>ServiceProperties</KEY>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>ModelIcon</KEY>
    <STRING>MOTV3-black.tiff</STRING>
    <KEY>ModelName</KEY>
    <STRING>NC-V3m</STRING> </DICT> </DICT>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>ServiceName</KEY>
    <STRING>com.apple.synchro</STRING>
    <KEY>ServiceProperties</KEY>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>OnlySupportASCIIChar</KEY>
    <TRUE />
    <KEY>deleteContactBeforeModifying</KEY>
    <TRUE />
    <KEY>stringEncoding</KEY>
    <STRING>UCS2</STRING> </DICT> </DICT> </ARRAY> </DICT>
    <KEY>com.motorola.usb-bt.0x22B8/0x2A64</KEY>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>Identification</KEY>
    <DICT>
    <KEY>com.apple.usb.vendorid-modelid</KEY>
    <STRING>0x22B8/0x2A64</STRING> </DICT>
    <KEY>InheritsFrom</KEY>
    <ARRAY>
    <STRING>family.com.motorola.p2k.usb-bt</STRING> </ARRAY>
    <KEY>Services</KEY>
    <ARRAY /> </DICT>

    Save the file and close it. Proceed

    9) Click Find me.

    10) On your computer click the Set Up New Device button on the Bluetooth Preference window.

    11) Click continue.

    12) Select Mobile Phone click continue.

    13) Your phone should be appear in the list. Select the phone and click continue.

    14) At this next screen click continue.

    15) A code should appear on your computer. And your phone should make a noise and ask if you want to bond with the computer.

    16) Select yes on the phone.

    17) Enter the code which your computer is showing into the phone then push ok.

    18) Your computer should show the phone setup with two options both are checked “Set up iSync to transfer contacts and events” and “access the internet with your phone’s data connection”
    Leave both checked (or uncheck the latter if you don’t want to use that feature) and hit continue on the computer.

    19)On your computer it should say “Congratulations ! your mobile phone is now set up…..” click quit.

    20) iSync should have come up. If not, launch iSync.

    21) If you do NOT see your phone listed in iSync click on the Devices Menu then click “Add Device” your phone should prompt you again for access click grant.

    NOTE: If you do not see your phone or it is marked as not available, then close iSync and reopen it. Now try to click: Devices Menu -> Add Device. It should now show up as a valid phone. Double click on the phone and it will be added into iSync.

    22) Choose whether you want to merge the information on the phone and computer or if you want to delete the information from the phone and then sync.

    23) Now you should be able to click sync and have your data transfer.

    29 thoughts on “Razr V3m and iSync”

    1. Thanks for the tip! Everything else i tried didn’t work. I really appreciate it.

      …The mac community comes through for me again. Just another reason why it makes my life more simple to use a mac. Great tip!

      God Bless.

      Mark
      Grand Rapids, MN

    2. Man, this was a beautiful hack. I had been trying to get a motorola v323i to do anything with iSync, and no luck. So I traded it in for a v3m because Apple advertised that iSync would work with a v3m. But I only got iSync to do the addressbook, no calendar. Now I have both!

      Now I am scratching my head over the USB cable. I can upload/download pictures and audio via Bluetooth on my G5, but not with the Motorola USB cable on my G4. Grrrr. All the USB cable
      does is charge the phone. Still searching the Internet for this one…

      Many thanks for the iCal sync!

    3. Jeff, the USB cable is also used for data tethering. EVDO can provide faster speeds than Bluetooth is capable of transmitting, so it is useful there.

      I don’t believe it is possible to use USB to upload/download audio, video or pictures on the Razr phones. If you’re able to find something though, please let me know.

    4. I did some more experimenting tonight. If I save a copy of the original MetaClasses.plist file,
      drop yours in place, and follow the instructions to remove/add the device in iSync, then I get iCal syncing to work beautifully. However your plist file is 103655 bytes, while the version I’ve got (MAc OS 10.4.9) is 107405 bytes. So I figure that I’ve got a newer version of the file, with more stuff, so I should merge in your RazorV3m additions above. I vi your file, save out the portion advertised as the relevant code on the webpage, vi the Apple version of the file, find the razorv3cverizon line and pull in the snippet at the line above. Then I remove/add my iSync devices again. No joy, it says that my phone does not support calendaring. :( As another note, the tiff file used in iSync is MOTV3-black.tiff in this case. With your plist file, it uses MOTV3-silver.tiff for the phone picture. Wonder what I did wrong???

      Now googling on EVDO to learn about that regarding USB transfer. Half of this is learning the lingo, I am new to fancy cell phones.

    5. I couldn’t tell you what all of the differences between the two files are. You could run the two files through diff in Terminal.app and it would tell you the differences between them.

      As for the icon… you’re absolutely right – it does display the silver icon in iSync, when it according to the changes, it should display the black icon. I actually have no idea why it does that, it must be related to something else in the MetaClasses.plist file. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure how everything works, since I didn’t come up with this stuff on my own.

      If I could get a copy of your unedited MetaClasses.plist, I can take a look at it and see what I can figure out though. you can send it to me at kyle [dot] schneider [at] gmail [dot] com.

    7. Well, there are a couple things you could try. I’m assuming that since you searched for problems regarding this, it didn’t just work for you out of the box like it did with my parent’s Razr V3m.

      Have you tried using the Clockskew plugin?

    8. I first tried replacing your MetaClasses.plist with the standard one on my G5 without success.
      Going back to the origional MetaClasses.plist, I have opened it and inserted your suggested text using Apple’s TextEdit applicaiton, but I cannot seem to save it satisfactorily as it only will save to RTF, HTML, XTML or doc.

      How do I save my edited .plist so that I can use it to replace my current one?

      Thanks,
      Allan

    9. Allan, when you open the file for editing, make your changes and simply use File -> Save instead of “Save as”. This will preserve the original filetype and formatting.

      But please, make sure that you make a backup copy of your .plist before editing it.

    10. Thanks dude. I tried the all the other methods without success. The zip file from your site worked on the very first try with my Sprint v3m.

    11. Great job kyle, got my v3m working after months of trying other plug ins. i only have one problem now,

      when my ical syncs to my RAZR, it only syncs one month. is there a fix to this?

      thanks

      PS i used your MetaClasses.plist and it worked…just thought you might need to know that to help me. thanks again

    12. Craig, in iSync, there should be an option for how far out you want to sync your calendar and how long to leave old entries on your phone.

    13. I am not sure what I am doing wrong. I still cant get my Razor V3m to sync calendars with iSync. I have tryed it with my MetaClasses.plist, newer, and the one you have here. Can someone help. I am runing Mac OS X v10.4.10 on a MacBook Pro.

    14. Thanks kyle.

      I have tried your method and others but no sucess – maybe
      you can help:
      I can get bluetooth to link up with the phone no problem,
      but when i try to connect to it via isync it says ‘no device
      found’. Strangely enough, before i copy in the modified
      plist file isync can ‘find the device’ but says isync cannot
      ‘connect to the device. Arghhh!

    15. SDA Team:

      Give this site a try. It seems that different firmware versions of the phone give different results depending on the method used. Restore your original MetaClasses.plist before you run their software though.

    16. Joe,

      I haven’t run into that error myself. Does anything show up under System Profiler when you try to sync it? Does using the “Setup Bluetooth Device” wizard get you anywhere?

    17. i got it, it was a simple iSync option that was set to only sync 1 week by default, i just had to select to sync unlimited. Thanks for everything. It is your tutorial that got it working before this small error.

    18. Thanks for the reply,

      I tried the clockscrew plugin with no sucess, and was
      ready to give up. I downloaded the
      the Intel SMC firmware update from mac feeling like
      i might at least be able to have some sucess with that
      …… and it solved my problem! Alls well that ends well.

      Thanks

    19. I upgraded my Intel MacBook to Leopard on Monday night (11/5/2007), and I am happy to report that iSync in Leopard supports the v3m with no hacking required. It will sync my phone with both calendar info from iCal and contacts from my addressbook. I did some digging around in the files and there are two tiff files, one for a silver v3m razr and one for a black one. The plist file references both of them. It managed to figure out which color of phone I had when I fired up iSync. :) Life is good with Leopard. Thanks.

    20. Nice that Leopard worked for you – it hasn’t for me. I saved my original plist and tried the routine with my old Tiger plist and the new ones from the sites – not only did they not work – now iSync won’t recognize my v3m – even after putting back my original plist. What I have noticed is that my original has no mention of motorola in it. I remember when this all happened in April and all you had to do w as go in and change false to true – but I could not find that line in there on any of the plists.

    21. Hi,
      Ive tried it both ways and I continue to get the same problem in bluetooth setup assistant which is “there were no supported services found on your device”. Any suggestions on whats going wrong?

      Thanks.

    22. Whoops, sorry for the long time before a reply, I was out of town.

      Try out clockskew and see if that works for you yasemin. There are so many things that could go wrong that are beyond my understanding that the only thing I can really do for you is suggest trying every solution someone comes up with.

    23. Your how-to still works as of tonight. Many thanks for providing the .plist file. I just finished syncing my phone’s contacts into Address Book and verifying. Now I can look into performing a Master Clear of the phone and trading it in for something a bit more … stable. I can’t complain, though. I’ve had the v3m for over 2 years without too many complaints, and that includes an incident where I dropped it into a rain-soaked gutter for more than 5 minutes.

    25. Kyle,
      Thanks for making the fix stupid-proof for someone like me. I followed your directions and it works perfectly on my V3m.

    27. I tried both methods on my RAZR v3c unlocked. During the Bluetooth Setup, there was no longer a selection to set the device up for iSync like there was before. I tried to add the RAZR v3 manually to iSync and it responded that the RAZR v3c is an unsupported devise. I also tried Jeff’s “merging” idea form 4/1/07 to no avail. When I returned to my original version of MetaClasses.plist the iSync selection returned. Of course, I still cannot sync my calendars. Any advise for a Leopard (OS X 10.5.8) user?

    28. More than 3 years later and this fix still works. What a relief! Thanks so much.

    29. Pingback: Syncing a Razr V3m using iSync | Ars Technica

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