Windows Mobile to Android SMS Converter

Download button(aka PIM Backup to SMS Backup & Restore Converter, or pim2smsbr)

The Windows Mobile to Android SMS Converter tool is a small script that converts the SMS content of PIM Backup files to an XML format compatible with SMS Backup & Restore, with the result that you can quite easily migrate all your SMS messages from your old Windows 6 mobile phone to your shiny new Android. See the blog post for more of an introduction.

Process

To migrate your messages, follow the steps below:

  1. Backup the SMS messages on your phone using PIM Backup
    • Ensure the “Binary backup” option in PIM Backup is unchecked when exporting your messages, or else this converter will not work.
  2. Copy your backup file (something like “PIMBackup_20110701.pib” by default) to your computer
  3. Ensure Python 2.x (note: NOT Python 3.x) is installed on your computer
  4. Download WinMo to Android SMS Converter tool (pim2smsbr.py) to your computer
  5. Through your command prompt or terminal, execute the command python pim2smsbr.py backup_file [output_file], where:
    • backup_file refers to the name of your PIM Backup file, something like PIMBackup_20110701.pib (if you created it on the date of this post), and
    • [output_file] is an optional argument that allows you to specify a filename for the output (or you can omit it, and it will output alongside the input file).
  6. Install SMS Backup & Restore on your Android device (free from Android Market)
  7. Copy the XML output file (from step 5) to the SMSBackupRestore folder on your Android’s SD card
  8. Run SMS Backup & Restore, choose Restore, and select the output file you just copied

And you’re done! Your SMS messages should be restored to your Android phone within a minute or so, and constructed into conversation threads with your existing contacts.

Finally, you can check out the source code on Bitbucket if you’d like to contribute. This software is provided under the Simplified BSD License. That means it’s free, and I’m not responsible if something goes wrong. I’m happy to provide whatever support I reasonably can, however!

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the comments below. If you can’t get it working and would like to send me your backup to convert, email it as an attachment to [dot] com, and I’ll reply with the converted result.


NOTE: This program will only convert your SMS messages, not emails, since they should be easy to recover. If you need to migrate other content let me know, but you probably don’t since there are usually easier ways (particularly with Google Sync).

FURTHER NOTE: This tool will only work with a text-based backup (i.e. “Binary backup” must be unchecked). If you still have your WinMo phone, you can always use PIM Backup to restore the binary backup and then re-export as a plain-text backup. If you do not still have your phone however, all is not lost: you can still install a WinMo emulator on your Windows PC, download PIM Backup to your PC, open it in the emulator, and do the restore/backup there. To do this:

  1. Follow the steps in the linked article to install and run an emulator
  2. Download PIM Backup to your computer and place it in the same directory as your binary backup file
  3. Go to File > Configure, set the “Shared folder” field to the location on your hard drive that contains PIM Backup and the binary backup file, and click OK
  4. In the emulator, go to Start > All Programs > More > More > File Explorer, scroll down and select Storage Card, then navigate to and select PPCPimBackup.exe
  5. In PIM Backup, choose the Restore action and Browse to your PIM Backup file (this may be very fiddly with the directional keys since the scrolling seems to be bugged)
  6. Press Next a couple of times to restore your backup to the emulator
  7. Once restored, follow a similar process to back up all your emulator data to a text-based backup file
  8. Finally, take this output and go to Step 2 in the conversion process