Not too long ago I’ve updated my mom’s laptop to the last version of Tiger, 10.4.11 and recently I found out that iSync failed to synchronize my mom’s Nokia 9300 phone. The phone’s connection is still set-up but there was an “x” on top of the phone’s icon in iSync’s window. As I remember, initially I did some modifications to the iSync plugins to get it to synchronize with my mom’s phone. Apparently the Tiger update overwritten my modifications to iSync. Since this is the second time I did it, I’d better document it somewhere so that I didn’t have to figure out the whole thing for the third time.

Out of the box, iSync supports Nokia 9300i to synchronize iCal and Address Book. But apparently my mom’s phone is a 9300 – without the “i”. Not sure why did Nokia took away the “i” and what features were stripped off along with it, but that one letter omission made the device unrecognizable by iSync. To make things worse, there isn’t any information in both Nokia’s nor Apple’s website on this. So I guess this is yet another example that not everything “just works” in the Mac-land as what the commercials say. But then Apple’s commercials are only about half-truths just like any other corporate advertisements.

Enough of the rants, here are the steps to get your Nokia 9300 to synchronize with Mac OS X Tiger with iSync. You might want to backup your iSync.app before trying this just in case anything went wrong.

1.        Go to /Applications and open the iSync application bundle (Ctrl-Click and select “Show Package Contents).
2.        From this folder, go further down to Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns
3.        Copy the bundle Nokia-9300i.phoneplugin to Nokia-9300.phoneplugin (note that the new bundle doesn’t have the ”i“).
4.        Open the new Nokia-9300.phoneplugin bundle.
5.        Go to the Contents folder and edit the Info.plist file with Text Edit (or the Property List editor if you have the developer kit installed). Edit the property values as according to the following table:

6.        Go further down to folder Resources
7.        Rename file com.nokia.9300i.tiff to com.nokia.9300.tiff
8.        Open file MetaClasses.plist and change the following references of 9300i to 9300

9.        Start iSync and configure the device as usual.