Synching with the Sony Ericsson K550i from Linux

My old Sony Ericsson T630 has, poor thing, found a watery grave at the bottom of the River Cherwell. Its replacement is a Sony Ericcson K550i.

I had my contacts list from the old phone backup up to my laptop using Multisync over Bluetooth. So the first big question - would I be able to restore the backup onto the K550i?

The laptop runs Debian Unstable with a KDE desktop. I set a Bluetooth phone name and enabled Bluetooth, and after a while KBluetooth found the phone and I could browse the phone file system.

So I started Multisync. I edited the configuration pair, went to options for the IrMC mobile device, made sure the connection type was set to Bluetooth and selected 'Search for units…'. It successfully found the K550i and updated the Bluetooth device address and channel.

So I tried syncing. No luck. I enable the experimental Resync button, and tried that. It detected that the phone side had been reset since the last sync, and asked if I wanted to restore. Yes, please! But still no luck.

Stumbling around at random, I tried the IrMC Mobile Device 'Options' tab, and unclicked all the entries on 'Bug workarounds' therein. Success! The sync completed and I have my contacts list back again.