Okay, here are the steps on how to go about doing it. I decided to create this simple step by step guide so that people will not have to struggle too much with this. It wasn’t that hard for me… the hard part came with actually importing the contacts.
Note : Your SIM card is also able to save numbers too and unless you have saved all your numbers into your SIM card, then you shouldn’t have to worry about it as all your need to do is put your all SIM card into the iphone and just copy it. (My mobile provider actually did this for me so yes you can just get them to do it for you!)
However if you’re like most people (me!) and you have some contacts in the phone memory and some in SIM card, then these steps will be applicable to you. In my case, almost 80% of my contacts were in the phone memory so I NEEDED to do this urgently! Anyway lets see how it’s done!
What you need?
1. The software application for your current mobile phone – make sure it’s already installed in your PC
2. A google mail account. If you already have gmail, just create another email account. You will be using this email account to sync the contacts with iphone
Note : I tried using windows live mail and Yahoo mail (these 2 are also supported when syncing with iPhone) but they could not import my contacts csv file correctly, so I ended up using my backup gmail account!
3. iTunes and your iPhone (duh!)
Step 1
From your current mobile phone software application, export your contacts. Since my pervious phone was a nokia, I used the nokia PC suite to do this. Just click on the Contacts Icon (make sure your phone is connected to your PC) and in the File tab, click on export and save the file in CSV format
Step 2
Create your backup gmail account and log in. In your gmail account, click on Contacts
Then click on Import
Once you’ve clicked on import, just click on Choose File and import that CSV file you created earlier!
Gmail will then import your contacts from the CSV file. Once gmail has imported all the contacts, now we need to look at iTunes.
NOTE : This is why I chose gmail ; gmail had no issues at all reading the CSV export file that my Nokia software application had created!
Syncing your gmail account with iTunes
iPhone allows you to sync your contacts with either, Yahoo, MSN Live, Outlook or Gmail. So remember, you can’t just import your CSV file straight to your iPhone. I am not sure whether this will work (didn’t really explore this anyway!)
In your iPhone (in iTunes), clieck on the Info tab. You will see the following. Select on Sync Contacts with Google Contacts and click on Configure.
iTunes will then ask you to specify your gmail account details. Just enter the Google ID username and password of your newly created email account.
From there, iTunes will automatically sync the contacts with that particular Gmail account you specified. Once everything is done, just click on the usual Sync button, to sync iTunes with iPhone.
And that’s it you are done!
pretty easy no? Please let me know if you need more help and clarification or if you found this helpful!
