Transfering phone contacts from Windows 8 on a Nokia phone to IPhone
The bigger a company gets, the stupider, it seems. I wanted to transfer the contacts from an old phone to a new one. Actually, since it was a phone - a smartphone, mind you - I thought it would be easy to just save everything to a file and import it to the other phone. Wrong! Every smartphone needs to be connected to some cloud account, otherwise it doesn't feel good. Let's enumerate the issues:
The day was saved by a very simple thing: a Nokia app that was installed by default on the phone called Transfer my Data. If you go to the app settings, it has the option to transfer all the contacts to a .vcf vCard file. All you have to do then is to email the .vcf file to your IPhone email account (I did it by first transferring it on my laptop via a USB cord and the standard Windows Explorer), open the email and click on the attached file. And voilà! Not only the contacts can be merged with existing contacts, but there is also the option to create entire new contacts (so overwrite and therefore delete old contacts).
Hope it helps someone who, like me, had to navigate through tens of unuseful and even deceitful corporate pages that try to force you to move your contacts to their cloud.
- There are contacts on your SIM, but the SIM cards are too small to hold all the information of your contacts or all the extra info the phone associates with them - so no way to transfer to SIM, then just be on your merry way. This was the old way. In Windows 8 and higher, for example, the option to transfer to SIM has been removed completely
- Each platform has it own cloud that, like clouds in the sky, are actually quite disconnected. Called it "corporate blindness", the symptoms being that you ignore that other companies even exist when you are working at one of these giants. You know, like when you are a character in a zombie movie and you see an undead walking towards you and you call it... a walker. Damn branding!
- There is no way to delete all the contacts on your IPhone without a special software, and the software is not Apple.
- There is no way to transfer contacts to a file from Windows 8. You can only transfer it to Outlook and then in a file
The day was saved by a very simple thing: a Nokia app that was installed by default on the phone called Transfer my Data. If you go to the app settings, it has the option to transfer all the contacts to a .vcf vCard file. All you have to do then is to email the .vcf file to your IPhone email account (I did it by first transferring it on my laptop via a USB cord and the standard Windows Explorer), open the email and click on the attached file. And voilà! Not only the contacts can be merged with existing contacts, but there is also the option to create entire new contacts (so overwrite and therefore delete old contacts).
Hope it helps someone who, like me, had to navigate through tens of unuseful and even deceitful corporate pages that try to force you to move your contacts to their cloud.
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