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?

MediaMonkey - one of the best podcast catcher out there

These days almost everyone has got a mp3/mp4 player. From ipods to iphones to a creative zen (which is one of my proud posessions). These devices are really nice music players but they can be used for much much more. I use mine for podcasts especially because it fits into my busy lifestyle. I hardly have time to readup on news stuff but can easily download podcasts that read the latest and greatest news out to me. To make this happen, one needs to get a podcast aggregator. You can easily get free software that does that for you. ITunes is good but not the best. One of the greatest softwares for this, as I found, is MediaMonkey . It allows you to easily create rules to download podcasts, create playlists automatically, delete the listened tracks and synchronise your media player so that you have the latest podcasts on it. It is simply magical and I am so glad I have it. I dont need to worry about anything except fire it up, wait it to finish downloading the podcasts, then connect my Creative Zen, wait for it to synch. And Viola! I am all ready for my journey.

Give it a try and let me know what you think of it.