Importing Contacts From Nokia To Samsung?

Here is a NON-IP post but the labour which I undertook to transfer contacts from Dad’s old Nokia to a newly bought Samsung made me write the instant post.

Gone are the days when a PC Suite software of Nokia could assist us in transferring our data from older Nokia to a new one. Now we have multiple platforms–Blackberry which is my favourite, Andriod, iOS, Windows among others. Since contacts were in Nokia, I first used the latest Nokia Suite and Samsung Kies on my Vaio. It proved to be a futile exercise since Nokia did not export the contacts in a .CSV format which the Kies required.

I turned to the older version of Nokia’s PC Suite program which I used till 2009. This version allowed me to export contacts in a .CSV format. However, Kies was not accommodating enough and imported names but not  the cellphone numbers and email addresses–because of some field conflict I reckon.

Thanks to Javed Anwer of TOI who suggested I try the following route: –

Nokia to PC to Google Contacts to Samsung Galaxy.

I uploaded the .CSV file to dad’s Google Contacts which was a smooth shift. Then came the stage of applying the sync from Google Contacts to Galaxy. After adding the SNS account option in the Contacts main menu, the entire address book got transferred to Galaxy from Google Contacts.

Success! Now dad is only trying to adjust to a newer platform rather than worrying about losing contacts.

Blackberry does its backups in a .bbb file, Nokia as .nbu and so forth. Maybe some day the transition is even smoother than today.

Hope it helps.