Why is it needed?

We observe that lots of users are switching to the new smartphone technology by leaving the old/obsolete symbian platform, But a  one of the main issue is the process of transfering contacts to the new phone. Many users tried the typical style of copying them through bluetooth and then save them one by one in the new device, But its a very lengthy process, and even if you are going to use an iPhone, then it is also not possible. That's why we thought that there should be an article to explain the whole process which can be applicable to both android and iOS operating systems.

Requirements:

To successfully transfer all of your contacts from a symbian phone to any of your smartphone, you should prepare the following:

• The device from which you want to copy contacts. It will be your old symbian phone.
• The new smartphone - where you want to save the contacts after transfering. It can be an android device, or an iPhone.
• A memory card which should be insurted in your symbian phone.
• A google, or iCloud account to use with a smartphone. An android device only supports signing in to a google account, but an iPhone can supports both types of accounts on it.
• A desktop or laptop computer with any windows operating system.
• An active internet connection on both computer and the smartphone.

Procedure:

To copy contacts at once, Please follow the following step-by-step instructions carefully:

1. Pick up your symbian phone and open its contacts application from the main menu.
2. When all of your existing contacts appears in the list, Press "options" key, go to "mark/unmark" submenu and select "mark all".
   Note: The name of the "mark/unmark" submenu may differ on your device, so please complete this step according to your own device's interface.
3. Now, you need to copy all contacts to the memory card. Generally you can find that entry after pressing "options" key, and going in to "create backup" submenu. Choose "to memory card" from within that menu. If your device's interface is slitely different, then perform it according to the situation.
4. When you choose "to memory card" option in the menu, your phone will ask whether you want to remove previously coppied contacts first from the memory card, before creating the new backup? It is safe to press "yes", because it will create a fresh copy of contacts on the memory card and remove all of the olders. It will start coppying, which will takes few seconds to few minutes, depending on the number of contacts being coppied.
5. On the completion, exit the contacts application and connect your phone to your computer via USB cable.
   Note: If you don't have the appropriate cable, You can also eject the memory card out of the device, put it in to the supported card reader, and then plug that in to USB port of your computer.
6. Brows to the memory card on your computer, open "others" folder, and copy the folder "contacts" from there to anywhere in your computer.
   For instant, we are going to paste that folder in the "d" drive of your computer. Press control+C to copy it from "others", go to the drive "D" from computer, and press control+V to paste it here.
7. Rest of the process should be done only on the computer. In this step, open command prompt from the startmenu or from the run dialog. Press windows key+R to open "run", type "cmd" without the quotes and hit enter. It will open the command prompt windows.
8. You need to navigate to the contacts directory, coppied in the previous step, in the command prompt. Type "cd d:\contacts" without the quotes, and hit enter, where the "cd" is the command for "change directory", "D" is the drive letter in which we've pasted that folder previously, and "contacts" is the folder name in which all contacts are stored.
9. Now we are going to merge all of your contacts in to a single VCF file to be imported anywhere. For this purpose type the following command
   copy *.vcf all.vcf
10. It will take few seconds to complete. Then type exit and hit enter, to close the command prompt windows
11. Now open the contacts folder from the drive "D", find the file name "all.vcf" here, and move this file out of the folder by using cut/paste commands.
12. Now you can import this file to any of your iCloud or google account, whatever is signed in on your smartphone, and your contacts will automatically appears on your device.
    We suggest that if you have a google account, use that account for storing contacts. Because it is supported on both android and iOS platforms, and you will no need to do all of the above to transfer contacts in future if you switched to another smartphone anytime later. Go to www.google.com/contacts on your computer, login with the same google account which is signed in on your device, and choose import contacts there.
    Note: Sometime, the google contact preview will open, which is not properly accessible with JAWS or NVDA. In such cases, you need to first click on "leave contacts preview" after logging in to your account, and then find the "import contacts" option. Then, choose "brows" button, and navigate to that directory which you have saved that "all.vcf" file, and open that file and then click "import" button. It will immediately save all of your contacts in your google account, which will be automatically synced to your phone in few minutes.

All done!

Happy computing!