How do I move contacts from my Nokia to my Android Phone?

Contributed by J.J. Meddaugh
http://www.ATGuys.com


Many of you, like me, were using Nokia phones previous to experimenting with Android. One of the tasks I wished to accomplish early was to import my contacts, as I certainly did not want to reenter these. If you're in this situation, here is some information on how I accomplished this.

Exporting Contacts from the Nokia

First, I exported my contacts from my Nokia phone. On my N82, I did the following:

1. Opened my list of contacts on the phone.
2. Pressed button 1 for the Options menu, arrowed down to Mark/Unmark, and pressed OK.
3. Selected Mark All and pressed OK.
4. Returned to my list of contacts, pressed button 1, selected Copy, and pressed OK.
5. Selected To Memory Card and pressed OK. The contacts are copied to the memory card on the phone. Note that if your phone has internal memory, you may need to adjust this step slightly.

Copying contacts to the Computer and Preparing them for Android

Next, I connected my phone to my computer. On the memory card or mass storage is a folder called Other. under the Other folder is a subfolder called Contacts. The Contacts subfolder contains a VCard or .vcf file for each individual contact. These files are in plain text, so you can open one with Notepad to make sure it's fine or to find out how these types of files are formatted.

In order to import my contacts, I needed to combine all of these separate .vcf files into one Large file. Here's how I accomplished this:

1. On the computer, opened the command-line shell by pressing Windows-R, then typing "cmd" and pressing enter.
2. Switched to the directory where my contacts were located. For instance, if your contacts are on a memory card on drive E, you might type the following line followed by enter:
cd e:\other\contacts
3. Used the copy command to combine the separate files into a single.vcf file with all of the contacts by typing the following command and pressing enter:
copy *.vcf all.vcf
Now the directory should contain a new file called All.vcf. You can again open this file with Notepad or another text editor to verify it is right. When you do, you should find an entry for each of your contacts.
4. Typed exit and pressed enter to close the command-line shell.

Uploading Contacts to the Google Cloud

Finally, I needed to import these contact files to a Google account that is linked to my Android phone. You can use a Gmail account or another Email account connected to Google Apps. Here's what I did:

The following steps involve going to the Gmail page. If you are using the Basic HTML view, you will need to switch to the standard view to accomplish these steps. The link to do this is near the bottom of the page. If your screen reader does not support standard view, you may need to download NVDA or another alternative to complete these steps. Note: I had better luck with NVDA in Firefox than in Internet Explorer.

1. Logged in to my Gmail or Google Apps Email account.
2. From my Inbox screen, Selected the Contacts link. You may need to refresh your webpage buffer to find the contacts in your account.
3. Selected the Import Contacts link.
4. Pressed the Browse button, and selected the All.vcf file I created earlier.
5. Selected import to upload my contacts.

Be aware that if other contacts were already on your Gmail page, these will also be synced to your Android. You can delete them ahead of time or just decide to copy all of them.

Importing Contacts to Android

If your Google account is linked to your phone, which it probably is, your contacts sync within a couple of minutes. If you need to link an account, you can do that from the phone. On your Android device, open contacts, press the menu button, arrow to accounts, and follow the prompts to add a new Google account. You can also choose if you want to sync your contacts between your computer and phone.