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?

Too many chat clients? Maybe its time you started Pidgin'in

How many of you have got more than one chat client installed on your computer? Well as for me, I have got yahoo,gtalk,windows live installed on mine. The reason for this is because I have friends that are not all on one network. And I guess I cant blame them because there is no ONE network that everyone likes. Windows Live is good but then so is Yahoo Messanger. Google Talk is the new kid on the block but then it is not to be taken lightly. Keeping track of multiple chat clients can be a task, and one needs to free as much time administering stuff, and should instead use that time surfing the web or doing other productive tasks :)

Also, I am all about trying to lower my RAM and CPU usage, and having 3 clients, each adding about 50M of RAM footprint doesnt quite seem right to me. So I started looking around for chat clients that would handle multiple networks. There are quite a few out there but I settled on Pidgin. Its quite a nifty software and it supports all the three networks that I currently have single clients to (I also checked out trillian, but that doesnt support Google Talk :( ). Now, all I have is one client that doesnt use more than 40MB of RAM.

There is one gripe with this client (actually it is with all the other single chat clients as well). I still havent been able to bind a timezone to my chat buddies. This will be handy since then you would know what their local time is instead of having to ask them.. dont you think that would be a cool addition?

Anyways, you can try pidigin out for yourself. Click here to download yourself a copy.

A new monopoly in the making?

Microsoft has been in the OS industry for ages. Their debut came in 1981 with the release of MSDOS 1.0. And years later, here we are, with Microsoft dominating the desktops and servers of this world.

Google was started as a search engine in 1996. It was to rival the likes of Yahoo and Altavista. And this it did with such grace and perfection that now it is the search giant of the web industry. Google has become a verb that is known to pretty much everyone.

One of the things that Google is really good at is trying out new things. They dabbled their toes in emails with gmail, with cloud computing by offering GoogleApps. Then they wanted to try out the mobile market by releasing their open source mobile OS, Android. After that it was the release of Chrome, their flagship web browser, which gave Internet Explorer a run for its money.

And now Google has announced that they would like to scratch a mark of their own in the OS industry. They are looking at releasing Google Chrome OS, which will be in direct competition with Microsoft Windows. If Google gets as much fame and popularity in the OS market as it did in the search market, Microsoft will surely have a lot to worry about. Finally there will be a competitor that Microsoft will have to look out for. But then with pretty much taking over every part of the technological market under its wings, are we looking at a world domination from Google? Just imagine what this means? Already we have a Google satellite looking down at us, and then to have Google on our phones and not too far away, on our desktops and laptops?

Week 35 Article 02 - The wonderful world of Google Docs