Can't get at all my old phone contacts

[smontanaro]

I bought a new HTC EVO today, my first foray into the world of Android. I have been searching the forums for awhile trying to figure out how to get the phone contacts from my old Sanyo S1, but to no avail. I managed to get the two phones connected using Bluetooth and shipped all my contacts off to the EVO. I have the EVO connected to my Mac as via USB and set to appear as a hard drive. I can see about a bazillion .vcf files in my downloads/bluetooth folder.

I downloaded and installed Import Contacts but it just crashes. Visiting their website I saw that it's intended for pre 2.x Android and that Android 2.x has an app for that. Uninstall IC.

I found some sort of contacts app on the phone which prompted me to scan my SD card for .vcf files then told me I don't have an SD card. That may be, but I've got the dang files somewhere on my phone! Now I can't find the contacts app again.

I don't really want all of Gmail's synthetic contacts in my phone. I just want my phone numbers. I believe I have them on the phone somewhere but can't convert them into phonebook entries.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Skip Montanaro

 

[SeeK]

I'd really recommend just uploading the VCFs to your Gmail on your computer and syncing it to your phone from Settings > Accounts & Sync. Easiest way, always works. Unless your Sanyo has a really weird contact format in the contact cards, which I've seen on some Sony Ericsson phones among others. If you can, find a program to save your Sanyo's contacts to a CSV. The benefit of this is that a CSV will contain all your contacts in a single file, making the import and sync process much easier.

 

[truslide]

If you take your phones to sprint they do it for you at no charge. They should have asked when you bought your new phone. It takes about 15 or 20 minutes, so if you have a sprint store close by, that's the easiest way.

 

[PvilleComp]

As SeeK said, if you can save your old contacts as a CSV file the HTC People app can import it no problem.

If you have the new Office for the Mac, Outlook can also import the VCF files and then export a CSV that you can copy to the phone.

I don't remember off the top of my head if G-Mail will export CSV's.

Hope this helps

 

[takeshi]

I don't really want all of Gmail's synthetic contacts in my phone. I just want my phone numbers.

I'd recommend getting your contacts entered into gmail. First, that will provide you with a backup in case anything happens to your device. It will also make migrating your contacts much easier in the future.

I don't remember off the top of my head if G-Mail will export CSV's.

Contacts->More options->Export. OP doesn't have them in gmail though.

Gmail will import vCards. OP would need to get them transferred to the Mac to import them though.

 

[smontanaro]

Merge phone list w/ Gmail? Naaaah...

Thanks for the suggestions. I eventually got them slurped up into my phone contacts somehow. (Stumbled on something today. May Issac Asimov smile down on me from Andromeda if I ever need to find it again!)

(Getting way off-topic, I know...)

Backing up to Gmail would be okay I suppose, but I find the Gmail contact list to be pretty useless. I have a mailbox with I'm guessing something like 25,000 emails and over time Gmail has rather unhelpfully auto-generated oodles and oodles of "contacts" for me with wonderful email addresses such as "users-subscribe-skip=pobox.com@..." or "confirm-x8u2204ns999@...". In short, I am almost never going to spend the hours necessary to clean up my Gmail contacts list (I rarely send mail from Gmail anyway). As a result, I don't want my phone numbers mixed up with my Gmail mess. But maybe there's an app for that.

Also, as big as the EVO's screen is, it's still no substitute for either of my Mac screens at home (15" laptop or 20" cinema display) or the four 20" screens I have at work. It's highly unlikely that I will ever use it as a regular way to compose email (certainly not until until Swype offers me a beta). My train ride to work is only about 25 minutes long (much of the time I will have my laptop) and if I go anywhere further I'd definitely take my laptop, which I will tether to the EVO. So, while it has its uses, for me it is mostly (not necessarily in that order):

• phone
• modem
• small newspaper
• portable YouTube device so my two-year old grandson can watch Elmo anywhere

Skip