4 Ways To Keep Your Contacts When Switching Phones

One of the worst things about purchasing a new phone is making sure all your contacts are still intact. See, ordinarily, it’s just a simple matter of copying everything to your SIM card and swapping it out (or just using a machine in-store, depending on where you go). Unfortunately, that might not always work, for a whole array of different reasons. Thankfully, there are alternatives, and none of them are particularly complicated to pull off.

Note that, due to the fragmented nature of the mobile market, the steps for each method will vary by device (and not every method will work with every phone you’ve got). This is a general guide, to help you work out where to start. You should be able to do the rest on your own fairly easily.

Use Your SD Card

Some smartphones allow you to save contacts (or your entire phone book) to an SD card. On most Android phones, this process is fairly simple. Open up the Contacts (or People) application, then press the menu key on your phone. You should see a menu pop up with a number of different options. The one you’re after is “Export to Storage.”  This will save your save your contacts as a .vcf file.  From here, all you need to do is pop out the SD card and install it into your new device.

Unfortunately, this option isn’t exactly viable if you’ve an iPhone, as they don’t have micro SD slots.

Turn On Bluetooth

Another alternative is to use Bluetooth to transfer data between your two systems. This process should generally be the same, regardless of what make or model you’re using. So long as you’ve a device that supports Bluetooth, simply navigate to “Connections” on both devices, link the two together, and then transfer the relevant data. From there, you should be able to load up your phonebook on your new device.

Google Sync

The previous step didn’t actually work for me, unfortunately: my new phone couldn’t actually read the data from my old device’s phone book, and my previous phone wasn’t modern enough that it was able to transfer anything to the on-board SD card. Given that the SIM card was still locked to my old service provider, it seemed like I was effectively out of options. As a last-ditch effort, I decided I might as well check out Google Sync. After all, my new phone was an Android rig. It was worth a try, right?

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If you want to do the same, your first step will be to log in to Gmail (or just use the Gmail app). From the interface, you should be able to sync your contacts with relative ease. Once everything’s loaded up, all you need to do is log in to Gmail on your new phone, and sync again on there. Your entire contacts list should be transferred onto your new device, completely intact.

Download An App

There are a number of different backup applications that you can download, depending both on your smartphone and your service provider. A brief search on the iTunes store, Windows Marketplace or Google Play should turn up at least a few.