Yesterday a friend of mine asked how she can transfer her contacts from her old phone to the new one. She has tried to send the contact as business card via BT to her newphone. Unfortunately, on her new phone, she has to save all the contacts one by one. It takes a while because she has hundred of contacts.

I think it is a common problem for many of us too. How can we transfer contacts between phones? There are several ways to do that, but probably the simplest one is by using memory card. Here are the steps:

  • Make sure your memory card is inserted in your old phone.
  • Launch Contacts application and then select Options | Mark/Unmark | Mark all. It will select all contacts you have on the phone.

Select all contacts

  • Copy all the contacts to the memory card by selecting Options | Copy | To memory card.

Copy all contacts to memory card

  • Now you have your contacts in the memory card. They are stored in vCard format under \Others\Contacts folder.
  • The next step is to transfer your vCard files to the new phone. If your phones use the same format of memory card, for example Mini SD, it is much easier. Simply remove your memory card from the old phone and then insert it in the new phone.
  • What should you do if your phones use different format of memory cards, for example one is using Mini SD and another one is using RS MMC? You need to transfer the files using memory card on your PC. Copy all the files under \Others\Contacts folder from one memory card to the other one.
  • OK, now you have the memory card inserted on your new phone. Launch Contacts application then select Options | Copy | From memory card. It will import all the vCard files from the memory card to your Contacts application.

Copy all contacts from memory card

  • That’s it.

Update (11-June-2006): I have received some comments about contacts synchronization. Thanks to all of you…:) Actually you can also synchronize contacts using Nokia’s PC Suite and PIM software, like Microsoft Outlook. I have been using them and it works fine (although sometimes there are a few fields not synchronized correctly). If you have PC Suite + PIM software or may be iSync from Apple, you may not need this feature at all.

In some newer S60 phones, there is an application called Data Transfer, which can be used to synchronize contacts between S60 phones. Check Tools folder to see whether your phone has this application or not. It is very convenient to use. Thanks to Alexandre for pointing this out.