Saturday, June 08, 2013

Moving to Android: Part -3 : Contacts

This is a series of posts where I describe my experiences in moving from a Nokia Symbian device to a Google Nexus 4 running Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean).
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Contacts

Moving 165 contacts from my old phone was easy. On the E-72, Goto to the Contacts application, goto options, Select All, Send, Send using Bluetooth, pair and send. 1 minute later 165 contacts including contact pictures were on this Nexus-4. Now, tell the Nexus-4 to import contacts and the People application has this data. Fantastic!

Did the data come across correctly, yup! Can I use it seamlessly? not really... About 50 of those 165 contacts, had custom contact labels, not one of the custom labes came across. So now I have contacts with 4 "Work" entries and 2 "Home" entries and no way to differentiate between which of the 4 work contacts was "Mobile, Vonage Number, Skype Number or Mobile in India"...

This is an issue with vcard - the format used to transfer contacts over bluetooth, and not Android. vcard2.0 which was used, doesn't support custom labels.

But, there's a weird restriction - if I have these contacts sync with my Google account, I can re-assign them custom labels. However, if i want to sync with another non-google account (in my case using Activesync), I'm limited to 8 options and no 'custom' option.

This is something I have to figure out. I really don't want the phone book contacts merging with the 300 odd contacts that my Gmail account has managed to accquire over the years, and I do want the contacts to have custom labels...

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