In order to perform phone book and SMS backup under FreeBSD system (and probably any other, decent, POSIX compliant UNIX-alike system) is to make sure your phone is detected correctly.
Examples presented below will touch my Motorola E398 cell phone-- big, heavy, old phone, with excellent battery, TransFlash card, Bluetooth and USB cable acting either as a modem or a USB mass storage device (controllable via internal menu).
We're about to talk to the cell phone via AT/DT commands, this is why we must change the phone USB cable setting to "connection oriented", instead of "pendrive-alike".
In order to make E398 recognized by the FreeBSD kernel, I had to load following drivers:
kldload umodem
USB is of course supported as well.
After connecting the phone with USB host, one should see following information in a dmesg output:
wkoszek@laptop:~$ dmesg | grep ucom0 ucom0: <Motorola Inc. Motorola Phone (E398), class 2/0, rev 1.10/0.01, addr 3> on uhub0 ucom0: iclass 2/2 ucom0: data interface 1, has CM over data, has no break ucom0: status change notification available
Even though you could start session with your cell phone with cu(1) command:
wkoszek@laptop:~# cu -l /dev/cuaU0 -s 9600 Connected AT OK (you terminate session with 'Enter'+'~'+'.' combination)
I found it more convenient to deploy simple C program to perform all-at-once action.