Negative Latency

... when you try to be pr0, but fail to succeed

Recently, I became an Android phone user (Samsung Galaxy S, to be more precise) and one of the first quests I had to take was to transfer contacts from my old phone (Nokia 6300) to the new one. Unfortunatelly, I haven't found any complete guide on the net, so I decided to combine a number of found solutions and provide an ultimate one.

The easiest way of importing contacts into an Android phone is to import them to your Google account. To be honest, I don't find that satisfying - I would like to have my old contacts on my phone and my phone only.

Long story short, these are the steps that worked for me:

1. Install Nokia PC Suite and connect your phone to it. Then, go to Contacts and in the Nokia Communication Centre window select them all and choose File -> Export in order to save contacts info into a CSV file.

2.Open the CSV file in any text editor and find all occurences of ';' (semicolon) replacing them with ',' (comma). Yes, I know it doesn't seem right, but unfortunately the CSV to VCF conversion tool we are going to use later doesn't handle semicolons.

3. Open the CSV to vCard conversion tool and paste the content of the CVS file. Follow to the step 3 and copy all the content (it's a vCard now) and save it as a .vcf file.

4. Open the VCF file in any text editor and do two things:
- replace all occurences of quotation mark (") with an empty string (i.e. remove all quotation marks from the file) - without this you will have really ugly contact display and I don't even think that phone numbers would be working
- replace all occurences of 'FN: ' with 'FN:' (i.e. remove trailing whitespaces after the 'FN:' string) - without this you will have a space before every contact that has a 'Name' field set

5. Install an application that allows .vcf contact import - for me it was Samsung Kies, which has a nice option of importing contacts to your phone, not your Google account.

And that's it! After some time I was able to use my old Nokia contacts on my brand new Android phone. I hope you'll find this short guide useful :-).