Okay, spiffy new N900 in hand here, and an old-school Nokia 9300 is awaiting decommissioning. How do I unload my old contacts and reload into the N900?

Both devices support bluetooth, and I can pair them. I've found the "Transfer and sync" button under "Settings". But now what?

It occurs to me that I don't know what "sync" means, not really. Will it suck the existing data off my Symbian device and populate the Maemo contacts database? Or will it suck the empty database out of the N900 and zero my 9300? (Ohno!)

What does sync do?

Sync means synchronizing, making things the same (roughly).

Just try it out. It first pairs you with the old phone and then you get options for just copying stuff from old phone to N900 (one-way sync, or a copy) or doing normal sync (copies stuff both ways) etc.

Very easy and quite reliable, at least for me syncing N900 and E66.

I'm just asking out of an abundance of caution: I won't delete any data on either machine, right?

Nope it won't delete any data, but I guess that if two contacts have exact the same name on the N900 they will merge. I'm not entirely sure though.

I did this from a 9300 too. You get the option to "replace" or "merge". Whenever I do this, I know my new phone is blank, so I always choose "merge" to be on the safe side!

The only things you can't transfer is 9300 notes, and I had a TON of those. The only way I found to do it was to copy all the notes to a PC (via the memory card), run the STRINGS command on them (google this, you can get it from Microsoft) which will pull all the readable text from the files.

Convert all the files in one go, something like (on the PC, in a CMD prompt):
CD directory-where-notes-files-are
FOR %F IN (*.) DO STRINGS %F > %F.TXT
This is from memory so you may have to check the syntax of the FOR command (google!)

You can can then copy the resulting text files (*.TXT) back to the N900. They all end up with a stupid "Copyright Microsoft blah blah blah" header but at least they are readable.

this post is in the wrong forum, such things if asked in the general N900 forum will solicit more reponses

Appreciate the advice, all. Thanks very much.

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Well... maybe. I avoided the N900 subforum because my query wasn't hardware related. No good choices!

Just a final follow-up here for the benefit of the next person to use the power search button on t-m-o.

"Halloooo? Anybody?"
<sound of crickets>

My first attempts at getting the N900 to sync with my old 9300 met with failure -- that 9300 is at an old software release (6.03) and I saw repeated application failures on the 9300 whenever I tried to initiate a sync from the N900.

But on a hunch, I initiated the sync from the 9300 side (Tools->Data transfer). That went pretty well, and calendar/contacts migrated over bluetooth within about five minutes or so.