Transferring Contacts from Blackberry to iPhone

I was asked last week by a co-worker to help him with his personal phone to get all of his contacts from his old Blackberry to his new iPhone. I have done this before using different approches but here is how I tackled it this time.

My first question to him was to find out if he was using Gmail or Hotmail, this would simplify the process as I could setup Exchange ActiveSync for either of these accounts and all of his contacts would be stored in the Cloud. He was not a Gmail user (which I am more familiar with) but he is using Hotmail as his primary email account. Great, this will make it real easy. By using Hotmail I am able to import his contacts into his Hotmail contacts list via the Web interface and as long as contact syncing is turned on on his iPhone, the contacts will come down automatically and remain in sync between the phone and the Web.

Once I knew where the contacts would be stored, the first step would be to get the contacts off of the Blackberry. My friend included, a lot of users have the misconception that their contacts, like with the old flip phones, are store on the SIM card. Since this is not the case on most smartphones, including the Blackberry on hand, I had to download the blackberry desktop software from the RIM site and install it on a spare computer. Once installed, there was not much digging around to find the setting that allows you to pull the contacts off the phone and tell it to Sync with the Windows Contacts (I was using a Windows 7 Machine). It took only a minute or so to get the ~75 Contacts off of the Blackberry. I was done with the hardest part!

The next was fairly easy, in Windows contacts you select all the contacts and click "Export" on the menu bar, choose the CSV format in the next window. The next screen allows you to choose a location and the next and last screen is the one where you want to pay special attention. Make sure you select ALL the options here so that you do not loose contact information.

Now that I have all the contacts saved into a text file, it's time to get them into the iPhone via the Cloud. With his permission, I logged in to my co-worker's Hotmail account and poked around to find the import feature. You'll find it under Contacts -> Manage -> Import. On the import screen, there is no option for CSV but my first guess was right, pick Outlook.

On the following screen, you are asked about the format of the file, I choose CSV and Browsed to my file. Clicked the import button and that was it. 

All the contacts were now stored inside Microsoft Hotmail Contacts. I did not have to do anything on the iPhone until now. I grabbed my friend's iPhone, looked under Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendar and under his Hotmail Account Settings to ensure the contacts option was turned on. It was. I went back up one level to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendar and looked under the Contacts group settings, below all the Mail related settings, there is one option for Default Account, I made sure that his Hotmail was now the default. This ensures that next time he creates a contact on his phone, it goes to is Hotmail contacts not iCloud or some other accounts.

That's it. I verified that his contacts had already populated inside of his Contacts app on the phone and there they were. 

There are certainly many other ways that this could have been done, feel free to make any suggestions.