In anticipation of a future change from a Palm Centro to an iPhone, I exported the Palm Date Book to the desktop three times using the three available formats, Palm Desktop, Tab & Return, and vCal. I tried to import each of these into iCal 4.0.1 (1374) without success. I explored the help items, but found nothing specifically on point.

Having never tried this before, I'm not surprised with the results, but does someone know how this is to be done correctly? I haven't attempted exporting contacts yet, but that isn't as big a task for me as the Date Book.

Palm is one of those companies that tries to tie you down to your hardware by not offering useful ways to export their data. I personally got away from palm for contacts as soon as I got a newer ipod (30gb), and threw it under a bus as soon as I got my ipod touch. By that point the contact list on my palm pilot had a minimum of three copies of each contact on it, for no apparent reason other than a sync program with turrets and a stutter. The only thing it had going for it at the time was you could take notes on it, which you could not with my old ipod.

Technically, "vCal" is supposed to be standard format in the same way vCard is. But then you may be familiar with the wide abuse of the "mbox" standard? Unfortunately I have no experience with vCal files - feel free to put up a link to a snippet of your file or perhaps the entire thing if you care to somewhere, and I can look at it. I've found a few minutes of playing with Bash usually yields a sufficient conversion for addressbooks in mutated formats. (my recent favorite was a CSV file that had embedded commas all over the place)

Your reply got my juices flowing and I tried unsuccessfully to get around Palm's failure to enable useful exporting. I exported the Palm calendar in the Tab & Return format. Excel 2008 imported it without a problem. I exported the file in .csv and .txt formats. You guessed it, iCal wouldn't import them. It doesn't look as though Apple is any more helpful than Palm.

It finally dawned on me that it will be much easier to just set up my calendar when I go to the iPhone and go forward. I can keep the Palm software and calendar for historical reasons, but not carry it forward with the iPhone.

I am posting a second topic asking about whether MobileMe can be used without the Cloud feature. Thanks again for telling me what I needed to know.

Try using iCal. Go to File/Import and then find your data. Then sync your iPhone with your Mac.I synced my Palm data this way a year ago and it's working on my iTouch with no problems.