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Posts: 3 | Thanked: 1 time | Joined on Jan 2010
#1
Hello - this is my first post. Apologies if this is common knowledge to more experienced users, but I thought I would post a quick HOWTO on importing contacts from an old phone, beacause I just spent FAR too long trying to figure it out for myself. Hopefully this will prove useful to others experiencing the same problems as I just did.

In my case I was trying to get my contacts moved across from a rather ancient Samsung Z400.

First I tried the obvious route - bluetooth import from the contacts manager in the N900. I paired the device up no problem, but when it tried to get the contacts from the Z400, it just said "failed".

Here is what I had to do as a "plan B".

1) Connect old phone to PC, and use samsung pc studio to retreive contacts file - this came in the form of a Windows Address book file

2) Open Windows Address Book and export this file as a CSV. Unfortunately the address book manager in windows does not export a multiple-entry vCard file.

3) Google mail to the rescue! Import the CSV file into a new group (e.g "Phone") in your google mail contacts manager.

4) Still in Google mail, export this group as a vCard

5) Connect your N900 to your PC, as "mass storage device" and transfer this vCard file to a folder on the N900.

6) Disconnect and open the contacts manager, go to import the contacts as a file and with any luck you should now be able to import all your contacts from the vCard file.

The most important piece of information from this process for me was realising that the only import file format that the contacts manager in Maemo supports is the vCard format (correct me if I'm wrong!). This knowledge would have saved me a lot of time and it would therefore be very helpful if it were more obvious in the import screen!

I just got the N900 yesterday by the way - amazing phone!
 

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#2
This is great but a much easier way is to simply transfer via bluetooth--which most phones nowadays have.
 
Posts: 488 | Thanked: 107 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Asgard / Midgard / London
#3
Originally Posted by x61 View Post
This is great but a much easier way is to simply transfer via bluetooth--which most phones nowadays have.
He already tried that and it failed.
 
Posts: 3,841 | Thanked: 1,079 times | Joined on Nov 2006
#4
Originally Posted by x61 View Post
This is great but a much easier way is to simply transfer via bluetooth--which most phones nowadays have.
There's a bug that prevents the N900 from receiving vcard files via bluetooth, unless that's a small file with a single entry (I haven't tested intermediate size, say, 2-5 entries. I only know that a file with 1 works, but a file with many bails out with a no space error).

The bug is very annoying because the N900 file-by-bluetooth application shouldn't care at all what file type it is, particularly when you're only selecting save, not open. Receiving other kinds of files works, which just show that there's a design error there somewhere.

(I don't recall the bug ID).
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