Andrew and Lizzie

Lizzie and I recently got ourselves an HTC Desire each, to replace my Nokia E71 and her Nokia 6700 Classic.  It wasn’t hard to get my contacts out of my phone — S60 supports SyncML, so does Google, and they have instructions.  Lizzie’s phone was harder — it doesn’t have WiFi, I’d waited until the number had been ported, so OTA wouldn’t work, and it doesn’t support user-configurable SyncML anyway.  I couldn’t find any information online about how to export the contacts from S40 then import them into Android, so having got it to work I thought I should share.

What S40 does do is have an option to back up data (including contacts) onto the SD card.  I did that, then used a bluetooth file browser to pull the file onto my laptop.  This gave me a file called Backup003.NBF.  Google’s not much help on what you can do with this type of file — there are a couple of dodgy-looking Windows applications that look like they may help, but I’m not willing to pay for them, or even to try to run them, and I don’t have a Windows machine anyway.

In desperation, I ran file on the file, just to see what it would say.  In hindsight, I should have tried that first.  It turns out that it’s a zip archive.  Unzipping it gives you a few directories and one holds all your contacts as separate VCF files.  VCF is a nice format, in that you can concatenate valid files together and end up with a new valid file, so I didn’t have to upload them all to Google Contacts separately.  Once I had loaded them all into Google Contacts, they automatically synced with the phone.  Job done, a lot more easily than I’d feared.