6/7/2017 TransferyourcontactstoanoldNokiaSymbianS40mobilephone|LambrosPetrou

Lambros Petrou
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Transfer your contacts to an old

Nokia Symbian S40 mobile phone
JUNE 30, 2016 | THURSDAY

Every now and then we have to change phones and transfer

contacts from one device to another. Its a trivial thing to do
nowadays with Android, iOS and Windows Phone, but try to
do it on an old Nokia Symbian S40 phone. Its 2016 and this
simple thing is justfuxxing too complex. And its standards
inconsistencies and Nokia to blame!

Problem

I have my contacts inGoogle Contacts, how they got there

from an older S40 device is an even more fascinating story
but lets leave it for another post. Now I just want to import
these contacts into aNokia 301, which runs Nokia Symbian
S40, and yes some people still use this kind of phones,
obviously not me :

Solution 1 - Nokia PC Suite

Nokia PC Suite was a nice tool by Nokia,if and only ifit

worked with your phone. In order to make it to recognise
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the device I had to install specific versions of the software

Nokia PC Suite version 7.1.180.94 and specific version of
the Nokia Connectivity Cable driver version 7.1.182.0.

OK, we are connected and we can manage the device

through the PC suite. Now, what?

First of all, I needed to have the contacts in a form that can

be imported somehow by the PC suite, so I exported all the
contacts from Google to.csvand.vcfformats just in case
one did not work.

There is a handy option in PC suite when you open the

contacts section:

File=>Import

which allows you to select any .csv, .vcf file to directly import
into your phone. Of course this would be too easy : so
neither the .csv nor the .vcf import worked using the files
from Google Export.

The problem with.csvis that Googles csv format follows a

different structure compared to Nokias PC suite so thats
anogo. The problem with.vcfis that this one file was
containing ~1000 contacts but the import functionality was
only importing 1 contact the same happens when you send
this .vcf file directly to the phone via Bluetooth.

After spending several hours going through myriads of

forums with people asking for a solution I foundthis
artclewritten in 2009 that provides a solution to split this
single .vcf file into multiple .vcf files, one for each contact.
The tool mentioned in the article, which I also used isvCard
SplitbyPhilip Storry.

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Very important
In step 3 see screenshot below you have to
selectForce version 2.1otherwise Nokia PC suite will
complain and fail to import the contacts. And also
select/check theRemove Type informationoption
because Google puts a TYPE section in each .vcf which
is again not recognizable by PC suite.

Awesome, we have all our contacts splitted in a single .vcf

file per contact. Now the last thing to do is just select all
these .vcf files, COPY them CTRL + C and then PASTE them
CTRL + V into the PC suite contacts section, or simply use
theFile => Importwizard and select all the .vcf files from
the opened window.

Great, the tool seems to be importing the files and finishes

successfully.But, there is a catch : It seems that Nokia only
cares about english/latin characters and any Greek character
is converted into a weird symbol which makes your
contactsuseless.
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I searched for quite some time to find a way to bypass this

limitation but its not possible, so PC suite is out of the
question. If you want Greek contact names, Nokia PC suite is
aBIG FAIL.

Solution 2 - Nokia Transfer app

and an Android phone

To be honest this was the first solution I tried but it instantly

failed so I went on with PC suite, until that one also failed
and I returned to this one. This time I noticed that it was just
a small step missing to make it work.

Nokia bundles with the Nokia 301 an application

namedTansferwhich you can also manually install on your
own by downloading the.jar/.jadsetup files and using PC
suite to install them on the device. I manually installed the
latest versionTransfer 1.0.11.

This applications functionality is transferring data

fromsomephones over to your device viabluetooth. I have
a Motorolla Moto X and Moto G3 so I tried to use this and
transfer the contacts directly from the Android phone to the
Nokia phone. The problem was that I was always getting the
errorThis service is not supported by the phonewith
both Androids, which was weird.

Then I went with PC suite route but we know how that

ended up. So I decided to give another go on this simple
method. This time, the magic was that I deleted
thebluetooth pairingbetween the phones on both of
them.

The following steps did the job:

01. Turn on bluetooth on Moto G3
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02. Turn on bluetooth on Nokia 301

03. On Nokia 301 go to bluetooth trusted devices and
search for new one. Select the Moto G3 and accept the
prompts in both phones,checking/selectingthe
option shown in Moto G3 which saysAllow Nokia 301
to read contact information.
04. OpenNokia Transferapp on Nokia 301 inside the
Applications menu option
05. SelectAdd new deviceand wait until Moto G3 appears
and select it
06. Select Moto G3 from the populated list
07. SelectImport contacts
08. Wait for the import to finish :

And now I finally have all the contacts from Google into the
Nokia 301.

Conclusion

If you have a compatible device with Nokia Transfer app it is

by far the easiest way to import your contacts into a new
Nokia S40 phone, but remember to delete the pairing and
then do it properly allowing access to contacts.

If you want to use PC Suite, unfortunately you cannot import

contacts with Greek names, and most probably any contact
name with nonANSI characters.

But please, upgrade your phones to something modern,

preferably Android :

References

Import Google Contacts to Nokia PC Suite

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vCard Split
Nokia Suite Support for Nokia 301 Microsoft Answers

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