Thursday, May 24, 2012

Transfer Contacts from Blackberry Torch to iPhone



I hate to say this, but nowadays more people are ditching their blackberries for the iPhone or Android devices.

I recently had a request from a user who had been happily using a Blackberry Torch. He had just bought an iPhone 4S and wanted to know how he could move all his contacts to his new phone. I took this to be an easy task to do, but as I found a few minutes later, this was going to be quite a challenge. I found that I could not bulk copy the contacts onto the sim and move the sim across to the iPhone. The Blackberry Torch did not have any option to bulk copy contacts!! With at least 200 contacts, I did not want to waste a few days just moving contacts around, so I decided to find a better solution.

And here it is.
1. Create a gmail account (unless you already have one)
2. Download Google Sync onto your Blackberry Torch.
3. Sign in to your Google Sync using your Gmail Credentials from step 1. above
4. You will then be asked to sync your contacts to Gmail. Change the frequency to Manual.
5. Do a sync of the contacts so that all contacts are uploaded to Gmail.
6. Once this is complete, login to your Gmail account
7. Go into Contacts. Under More, you will see the Export option. Click this.
8. Choose the following settings for Exporting Contacts

    - All Contacts
    - vCard format (for importing into Apple Address Book or another application)

9. Once you have done this, you will get a file with all your contacts in it.

Now we will import this into your iPhone. To do this, we will login to your iCloud account.
Please note that to get an iCloud account, you will need to be running at least iOS 5.0 on your iPhone. If you have not already done so, please create an iCloud account.

10. Login to your iCloud account using your browser by going to http://www.icloud.com
11. From the dashboard, click on Contacts (you might be asked to install the iCloud Web App Plugin) Click Install  for this.
12. Once you are in your iCloud contacts section, at the bottom you will see a spiked wheel icon. This is your settings icon. Click on it and choose Import vCard
13. You will then get a popup asking you for the location of the vCard file. Point it to the file that you exported from Gmail (Step 9)
14. Once the import is finished, Viola! Your contacts would have been uploaded to iCloud.
15. Ensure your iPhone has been setup to Sync its contacts with iCloud. If it has then all your imported Gmail Contacts will now show on your iPhone.

Yay!! How easy was that?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I followed steps 1 through 9.

From then on I used a third party program called copytrans contacts to drag/drop the Gmail contacts vCard directly to my iPhone:

http://www.copytrans.net/iphone-contacts.php

I find this even easier as I don't share my contact info with Apple's iCloud servers + its even easier to transfer the contacts with only one additional step to go.

Nivlesh Chandra said...

Hi potalpo.

That is a really neat software. Great find and thanks.

Onyx said...

Blackberry should be ashamed that you can't easily export contacts i d/l 3 Apps to no avail. Finally did this with Windows 7:

http://gadgetress.freedomblogging.com/2010/01/30/where-are-my-contacts-in-windows-7/33285/

Was able to Export using BB Desktop Software to a Windows Contact List

Then Download windows Live Software Juuust to get an excel .CSV file to import into Gmail Contacts.

Wow!

jrwest said...

Good methods.
But I would like to say the easy way to transfer contact from Blackberry to iPhone is using RecoveryAndroid Phone Transfer. If you want to do so, just search on internet.