How do I transfer my contacts from old phone?

[devsk]

My old phone has bluetooth but trying to transfer the contacts to G1 using bluetooth resulted in "send failed...". This looks like a major omission for a modern phone.

How did people transfer their contacts from old phone? My contact list is huge to be transferring that manually in 2008. I had transferred contacts from my old phone to my current Samsung in 2003 using Bluetooth.

any ideas folks?

Thanks,
devsk

[smasraum]

Well, if you can get your contact list into gmail, then it'll be on your phone. I'm not sure of any other way. I suppose that if you can get it into Outlook, then you can setup the sync from Outlook to Gmail to the phone.

[devsk]

Well, if you can get your contact list into gmail, then it'll be on your phone. I'm not sure of any other way. I suppose that if you can get it into Outlook, then you can setup the sync from Outlook to Gmail to the phone.

I will have to install Outlook for this? NO! I chose G1 because I run away whenever I see something MS/Apple. And now I have to install Windows to get my contacts onto G1...

But its not a laughing matter. How did Google think people will transfer their existing phonebook to this phone?

[smasraum]

Well, besides the first method that I mentioned (enter them into your Gmail Contacts), if they are already in your existing phone, makes sure that they are saved to the SIM card or save them there, and then move the SIM and tell the phone to read the contacts from the SIM.

[joshtheitguy]

Well, besides the first method that I mentioned (enter them into your Gmail Contacts), if they are already in your existing phone, makes sure that they are saved to the SIM card or save them there, and then move the SIM and tell the phone to read the contacts from the SIM.

This is what I did.

[neoprimal]

Luckily, I didn't need to do anything. My last 3 phones have been Windows Mobile so I've had to use Outlook, and I'm paranoid about losing and anal about updating phone numbers because I have so many. So I use Plaxo. Soocial is an alternative (I think).
Outlook syncs with Plaxo, which syncs with Gmail/Yahoo/Etc. so I had all my contacts when I logged in.

If you're coming from a dumbphone, the best thing I can think of for you to do is pray that it has some kind of application that can be installed to your PC, and that this program has a way to import but moreso, export contacts. Then all you have to do is export it to a universal contact file and pick that up with Gmail. It's not too difficult.

[devsk]

I am hating on Google at this time BIG TIME! After nearly wasting 6 hours on getting my contacts on to gmail I give up.

I found a laptop with Bluetooth because that's the only way to get the contacts off of my existing phone. First outlook gave me tonnes of trouble because bluetooth wouldn't transfer directly to Outlook. Ok, I saved the contacts in a folder and clicked 'save and close' 165 times to add those in Outlook. Fine everything in. Exported them to CSV format. Went to gmail.com and tried to import the CSV file. Guess what? It imported the contacts but for 150 entries the didn't put in any name because lastname entry was missing. Is gmail so dumb that it can't pass over a comma i.e. when it sees there are two commas, it means that that entry is not there and just use the First Name alone. It created phone number entries for those without a name....

I am going crazy with this. How hard is importing CSV? c'mon!

[devsk]

Ok. I edited the CSV put unknown in 'Last Name' column for every contact that had it missing. Now I have all my contacts in G1. A task that would be less than 6 minutes with bluetooth phonebook transfer, took more than 6 hours. G1 (I have heard iPhone is the same as well) gets a big zero in this department....:-(

[boyzie]

Ok. I edited the CSV put unknown in 'Last Name' column for every contact that had it missing. Now I have all my contacts in G1. A task that would be less than 6 minutes with bluetooth phonebook transfer, took more than 6 hours. G1 (I have heard iPhone is the same as well) gets a big zero in this department....:-(

I entered a couple of contacts manually into Gmail, then exported them through Gmail as a CSV, this I named as Gmail template. I now had a template that Gmail had created and therefore liked. I then copied and pasted all my contacts from a csv created by outlook into the relevant coloums in the gmail template csv. Unfortunatly you have to convert all the cells to text otherwise excel will remove the 0 from the start of phone numbers.

Anyway worked great, hope it makes sense.

[devsk]

I don't know about others, but I am finding that it is too much trouble for simple tasks which mobile phones from 5 years ago handled better. Are we going backwards?