Migrating Contacts from a Nokia 6020 to a Nokia N8 (Desciption)

This is the long story version. If you want just the steps, look at the other post. 
[ Migrating Contacts from Nokia 6020 to Nokia N8 (Steps) ]

I recently bought a Nokia N8 [1] to replace my mom’s aging Nokia 6020 [2]. I figured I’d do the right thing and move her contacts over from her old phone to the new one, so that she didn’t have to do the chore of transferring over 300 contacts between phones manually. This should be a piece of cake right? After all, I’ve done this transferring of contacts between Nokia phones before (from a Nokia 6126 to my current Nokia E-72)

Nokia has always made good phones and good connectivity options. The 6020 when launched in 2004 had the option to connect to a computer using a data cable (Either a DKU-5 or another Nokia data cable). My previous 6126 could also talk to a computer over both a DKU-5 cable or Bluetooth.

Later generations of the phones that have Bluetooth have a built in application called “Switch Phone”. This simple piece of software is now present on every shipping Nokia (Symbian based) phone. Its job is simple – make the process of changing phones simple. The process is relatively simple - pair the two phones over BT, initiate the Switch Phone software, go make a cup of coffee and when you come back, all your contacts, photos etc will get transferred from the source to destination.

Anyway, I digress, my mom’s venerable 6020 was built before phone-switch came around (and before Bluetooth became prevalent) so, I had to revert to using the data cable. Anyway, full of enthusiasm, I found my trustworthy Nokia DKU-5 transfer cable (that connects to the 6020’s Nokia Pop_Port [3]), connected it to my laptop, fired up Nokia PC-Suite (version 7.1.62.1) and without much hassle, I was able to pull all 393 contacts off the phone and into a .csv file. “Sweet!”, I thought. This was going to be easier that I thought. However, life’s never that simple…

To begin with, the N8, is not supported by Nokia PC suite. I had to get the new sync suite from Nokia called Nokia Suite, installed it, plugged in the N8, got it setup & got the latest updates (Software=Nokia Belle) for the phone. Ok, this was going smooth. Now to import contacts. So, I open the Contacts application, clicked on Import Contacts and… nothing… Nokia Suite cannot import from any format EXCEPT individual .VCF files.

Ok.. so I have to convert my 393 contacts sitting in a neat .csv file to 393 individual VCF files. How do I do that? To begin, I turned to my email client Thunderbird [4], got it to import the contact list. Now, Thunderbird will export as .VCF but it will export a single file with all the contacts inside it. VCF files come in two flavors –

a)Single contact (One file has one contact). This is the traditional email business card format.
b) Multiple contacts (One file with multiple contacts, each delimited as per specification). This is the traditional export for address books.

To export to VCARD, you may need the MoreCol extension[5]. So I went searching and found Philip Storry’s awesome VCARDSPLIT [6]. This tool does exactly what its name says. It takes a VCF file with multiple entries and splits it into individual files. I ran VCARDSPLIT on my exported list, got the 393 individual files, then dragged and dropped the entire collection into Nokia Suite. Nokia Suite then chugged away at my large drop of files and processed them and then said it was ready to sync. I clicked Sync Contacts and presto, in about 45 seconds, my mom’s new N8 had all her 393 contacts ready to be used.

 [1]http://www.nokia.com/us-en/products/phone/n8-00/
[2]http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6020-922.php
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Pop-Port
[4]www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/
[5]MoreFunctionsForAddressBook : http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html
[6]http://www.philipstorry.net/software/vcardsplit