Playing around with my new iphone I found it really amazing that there is no public api for synching text messages, contacts, emails or preferences settings with the iphone. Shame on you apple for being that proprietary...

At least for the address book I found the following nice workaround for synching the iphone with my thunderbird address book. Kudos go to this blog comment

The trick is to tell thunderbird to store it's contacts in the windows address book. This can be done by adding the following three lines to the prefs.js file in your profiles folder (make sure to close thunderbird before editing the file):

user_pref("ldap_2.servers.OE.description", "Outlook Express");
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.OE.dirType", 3);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.OE.uri", "moz-aboutlookdirectory://oe/");

Start up Thunderbird and open the address book. Now move all your contacts to the new "oe" address book. After doing so go to iTunes and synch your iphone with the outlook express address book. That's it ;-)