Mobile Phones tranfering contacts

Hi there

Bit of a long short, but hoping someone has come across this.

I have my old phone Sony P900 and my new phone O2 XDA Mini S (i-mate Kjam clone), now I want to do a simple task, which is get the contact from my old phone to my new one.

Now they are stored on the phone rather than the sim.

I thought ok I'll send them all by BT, but I would have to do them one by on (all 81 of them), would take ages, the same with IR. I can select all and send, but the Mini S will only accept the last one.

Oh, I don't use Outlook, hoping to find a 3rd party non M$ Proggie that could import the contacts, any ideas?

Cheers

 

There should be an option in the P900 menu to copy contacts to the sim card, thats what I have done with all of my last SE phones.

Then on the new phone, there should be a way to copy from the sim

 

Thanks for your reply Andy, would appear that I can only copy the contacts to the SIM one by one, by going to Contacts, click on contacts > edit then copy to SIM.

 

You're best bet will be to find some kind of sync software that supports both phones but that won't be easy as they're so different.

I had a similar problem when I went from P800 to K750i. In the end I used the PC Suite software that came with the P800 to sync to my Windows address book and then synced that to my K750i with either PC Suite or some 3rd party software, can't remember now.

Michael.

 

i'd say bite the bullet and use outlook. going the sim route will probably truncate your contacts names and if you have multiple contacts per number will either loose the other numbers or fragment your contacts. sims are pretty poor at storing things like this now. certainly with a windows phone using active synch with outlook is a total no brainer it's great.
by the way - nice phone...
cheers


julian

 

SE Phones (at least the K750i) are pretty good with transferring to SIM. I did this (transfer all contacts to SIM) when I wanted to put the SIM into my home DECT phone (which can read contacts from a SIM) in order to get all my numbers on there.

I also did it before re-flashing the firmware on my phone. Long names were preserved and multiple numbers for contacts were stored as:

Joe Bloggs/M
Joe Bloggs/W

...for Mobile, Work etc. When you then do read all contacts from SIM the K750i correctly puts the multiple numbers back into their correct places under the single phone contact - pretty cool I thought. Other contact info like e-mail address etc. is obviously lost in the transfer. Outlook is a total bloatware beast at the best of times and I reluctantly use it in the office but I wouldn't dream of installing it on a home PC, especially if all I needed it for was to sync some phone contacts!

Michael.

 

Michael, at last we agree on something I'm really reluctant to install Outlook just to get my contact on the phone, but I guess its just typical of M$ to force you into doing this, anyway I digress don't want to turn this is a an M$ bashing thread, I just to get my contacts on me phone and start using it! I've had it for 2 weeks now and all I've done is install software, attempted to make the font size bigger etc, not actually used it as a phone yet !

 

Well, installed Outlook last night, and what a waste of time that was, it wouldn't read the csv file, saying it was corrupt, funny I could load it in Notepad and Excel fine. So I still can't get my contacts across, I can see spending Wednesday transfering them manually, what a shame cos the phone looks and works cool, but its this one simple thing that lets it down, I'd be reluctant to buy another Windows Device based on this, next year should see a good selection of Linux devices, the Nokia 770 looks really good, but lacks office apps, but hopefully they'll resolve that by next year and give M$ a run for its money.

 

so the sony is providing a non standard file and it's m$ fault? how does that work then? i'm all for giving m$ a kicking when they deserve it but the windows phones i've used have been so much better than the nokia and se pieces of ****e i've used in the past it's not even funny. maybe the newer se phones are better but i wouldn't know as their past efforts have put me off big time.
linux is too tainted by the smell of geek to give m$ a challenge.
cheers


julian

 

Hi julian, the Se phone produces very good CSV's, it can also beam all the contacts by IR and BT, but the M$ phone is too stupid to be able to receive them, it can only do one at a time, and I have no idea why it can't read a Industry Standard CSV file.

Sorry the problem is with M$ here. I agree I can do a hell of a lot with this phone and its a great upgrade for the SE P900 but why is it so incapable of doing a simple job like importing contacts? This is such a simple task that I'm sure I'm missing something.

 

sorry got the wrong end of the stick there....

but surely you just synchronise your se with outlook and then use active synch to synch your new phone with outlook. i'm not sure why you are dealing with csv files at all.
cheers


julian.

 

Hi

Yep well tonight, I conceeded and sync'd the SE phone with outlook, this worked ok ish, it still took 3 attempts, but it got there in the end. Ok so now plug in the Mini S and let active sync send the contacts to the phone, but oh no, the sync option for contacts is greyed out.

Starting to loose the will to live!

 

So what part of "install and run" outlook haven't I done then?

Reasons why I HATE M$, need I say more.

 

lee,
it obviously feels your contempt and is messing you about. no idea what's going on there. i just plug in my spv and it synchs.
seems to be a few similar problems here...
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=active+synch+not+detecting+outlook&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

might be worthwhile try a few suggested fixes before deciding to play cricket with your new phone

cheers


julian

 

I gone through a similar process recently when going from a Nokia 6670 to a XDA Mini S. I beamed all my contacts across one by one via BT though to avoid installing the Nokia crap though.

I was hoping to avoid using Outlook also but gave in as I could not find any alternatives. Thankfully I have to use Outlook on my work laptop so don't need to install it on my own one.

I am not sure I can help with your problem though, although I do remember getting the same message though. Are you definitely doing everything in the order specified, particularly the timing of connecting the device?

If you haven't seen it already take a look at XDA-Developers. The XDA Mini S (and i-mate K-JAM) is a rebadged HTC Wizard. I would advise reflashing the devices firmware to a different brand to get rid of all the o2 crap. I am running the Qtek firmware at the moment and it feels about 5 times quicker than the original o2 one. You will need manually enter MMS etc settings for o2 though.

Other firmwares also enable more functionality such as push email so it can be used the same way as a Blackberry.

 

Thanks Julian and Ian, good suggestions there, I'll try upgrading to activesync 4.1 and tuning my firewall tonight to see if that helps, shame that no one has written an alternative, but I guess its difficult. Yes I've thought about flashing it with a different firmware to get rid of the O2 stuff, but then I found another "trick" to stop the 02 active stuff from being installed which helps a lot. I can see me doing the same as you though and beaming the contacts over one by one, oh well have a few friend coming over on Thursday, sure they wouldn't mind helping me out with this manual process!

 

I didn't think about versions, I am sure I read somewhere that activesync 4.0 was 'broken' so that may fix the issues you have.

I removed the active stuff about 5 minutes after setting the phone up for the first time. I tried both the basic and corporate settings but still wasn't happy until reflashing.

I really didn't want an MS phone/pda but given that there isn't really any choice, I don't think palm os will last long, decided to give one a try. I am still not 100% happy, a lot of software I have tried seems buggy and frequently leaves remnants of closed windows similar to windows when running out of memory. I honestly haven't spent much time messing around though since reflashing the firmware.

 

I hear what your saying there Ian, I'm just the same, I didn't want a M$ device, but like you say there is little choice at the moment, but I think the Linux devices like the Nokia 770 are coming on strong, we should see some movement in that area for next year, so only have to put up with this device for a year, shame the drivers for this device are not open source or else someone could write a linux distro for it, now that would be nice a linux firmware !

 

Installed Activesync 4.1 and tuned the firewall, now nothing works, it will not find the phone now, even with the firewall off, tried to go back to 4.0 but nothing, its totally b*ggered now.

 

Ah, doesn't sound too good! Not sure what to suggest, did you try that forum link? There may be someone there who has had similar problems.