S60Tips.com

Some of Nokia’s S60 phones are branded XPressMusic, for example 3250, N71, N80 and N91. Do you know that we can synchronize XPressMusic phones with Windows Media Player (WMP)? It supports WMP 10 and 11. Note that some devices do not support DRM-protected music files yet. Some newer devices, such as Nokia N95 and N81, do support it already.

Here is how we can do it:

• Insert your phone to the PC via USB cable. Select Media Player when the phone asks connection mode. If your phone does not ask for connection mode, go to Connectivity | Data cable. You should be able to select Media Player there. Note that non-XPressMusic phones do not have this option.

• If you insert your phone for the first time, Windows will install necessary driver. If your Windows is not able to find the driver, try to insert the CD-ROM that comes with your phone package. Locate a folder that contains an .inf file (the file naming may vary for each phone, for example “N71 Windows Media Player 11 driver.inf”). After you install the driver, your phone will be recognized as WM portable device.

• Now you can launch WM Player and start synchronizing MP3 files to your phone. You can also set WMP to synchronize automatically each time you insert the device.

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.

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

• 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.