In my previous job I had a lengthy commute home by car, which consisted of heading round the M4 and the M25 everyday. This surely is some people’s idea of hell on earth, and by the end of three and half years it was pretty much mine too.

One of the highlights though was that I often was in a good place to listen to Radio 4’s comedy half-hour, which consists of some real classics such as Just a Minute and I’m sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Also in this slot was a programme, originally hosted by David Baddiel, called Heresy, where, “opinionated panellists use their wit and wisdom to argue against narrow-minded thinking and received opinions of the day,”  as it says on the BBC Radio 4 web page that described the programme.

I mention all this because the show came to mind after a briefing I had yesterday with a Microsoft to get a demo of its new virtualisation management tool, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Now ‘received opinion’ goes like this: Google – good, Microsoft - evil but I was thrown a curve ball by the fact that the virtualisation guys, Neil and Julius, are as nice a couple of chaps as you could hope to meet. So you clearly don’t have to be evil to work there.

On a practical note it was genuinely useful to actually see a virtualisation tool in action. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually run a virtualised server of any description so getting a demo of how it actually works made the whole virtualisation thing, well, a lot more real.

Julius was demoing by making a VPN connection into his test network and viewing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, (which looks just like Outlook) over a remote desktop connection. In turn, the tool gives you then see a snapshot of your virtual hosts and the virtual applications running of each host. It’s all quite zen really when you think about it.

Why is it that transferring your contacts from one device to another is so complicated? The problems came as I have decided to finally move on from my venerable K800i mobile phone.

I have to say that while it’s ‘just’ a consumer phone, I think the K800i has a good chance of going down as a bone fide classic in the mobile museum. I’ve had it for two years and it has nary skipped a beat, it’s great to hold, takes fabulous pictures and does that basic phone stuff pretty well too. The thing is that internet access and email have become higher priorities than pictures and so a smartphone seemed to be in order.

Now the obvious choice was the iPhone 3G, but despite really liking using it with the three week trial I had from O2, head won over heart and I’ve resisted the urge to splurge £35 a month plus the £159 for the handset (no, the 8GB would not have been big enough). Instead I’ve taken the O2 Simplicity tariff route – as I’ve got access to other handsets I don’t need my network to give me one so instead I’ve got a tariff that essentially matches the iPhone’s – 600 minutes, 1000 texts and unlimited web access, and all for only £20 a month. Not bad.

The only downside is that I have to endure a Windows Mobile smartphone, currently an HTC Touch Diamond. Now I’m not going to rant or moan here about the frustrations or failures of that handset or indeed of its clunky underlying OS. (In fact, with its recent firmware updates the Touch Diamond hand become noticeably more responsive and therefore easier to use, compared to the device I had when I wrote my review).

No indeed I simply wanted to get my contacts from my K800i into my Touch Diamond. Now I can’t fault Sony Ericsson’ PC software, which has been spruced up since I last had call to use it. It’s fairly slick and I transferred my contacts from the phone over Bluetooth onto my Vista laptop.

The problem was that the laptop didn’t have Outlook on it and as such the contacts were imported into Vista’s new Contacts format. Now while I have no problem with this per se, the fact is that Windows Mobile and Vista contacts won’t play together – to sync with Windows Mobile you need Outlook.

Now having always had Outlook on any given system, I’d never given it much thought, but now I in this situation I realised how unfair it is that Microsoft forces you to pay for a program you might not otherwise want or need, just to be able to sync with your phone. With the Touch Diamond you get a 60 day trial of Outlook 2007 – after that you have to fork out to keep on syncing.

However, as it happens I had a copy or Office 2003 I could install, which I preceded to do. However, though it installed successfully, Outlook refused to launch – giving me a typically bizarre message that “Mapi32.dll was corrupt or the wrong version”, or some such.

Being an experience technical journalist my reaction to this was a measured, “Arrrgghhgghg!”

After much fannying about, the problem turned out to be solved by merely renaming a different file altogether to the one flagged in the error message (MSmapi32.dll) – thanks Microsoft, for that wonderful red herring routine. After that Outlook would happily launch.

However, I then had more fun. I had to get the Windows Vista contacts into Outlook. Not easy. Outlook won’t read them natively, so instead I got Windows Mail to export them to a format that Outlook can see. There are two choices – vCard and CSV. Initially I chose the former and it seems like a recognisable standard, and although it worked, when pulling them into Oulook, it opened each and every one of my contacts vCard and expected me to manually save a close all two hundred or so contacts.

Not likely. Instead I killed than and went for the more basic CSV approach and actually this worked perfectly save for some minor character corruption.

Interestingly, unlike with the non-smartphone, you can’t wirelessly sync on first connection with Windows Mobile using Bluetooth, the initial contact has to be via cable.

So after a painfully protracted process, I had my contacts on my Windows Mobile device.

What I wish was that this sort of thing could be avoided with some simple, preferably over-the-air solution. There are standard such as SyncML, and there are proprietary, and relatively expensive solutions such as setting up an Exchange server or MobileMe on the Mac. But if all you want to do if move your contacts from one phone to another so you don’t have to rekey all of auntie Mable’s numbers every time you change phone, well, there must be a better way.

Anyone know of one? Suggestions gratefully received.