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?

Upgrade to iOS 5 is causing a faster drain of the battery

After contemplating for a week, I finally decided to upgrade my iPhone 3Gs from 4.2.3 to iOS 5.0. After a very uneventful 20 minutes(I mean this in a nice way), my iPhone was upgraded to the newer and flashier iOS 5.0. There are alot of features bundled in this upgrade (200+) though I did notice that now my iPhone seems to be a bit sluggish compared to the previous iOS.

Another thing I noticed was that my phone's battery kept on draining out faster than before. Where previously I would charge my iPhone once a day, I was now doing it twice a day! The only reason I could put to this behaviour was the recent upgrade to iOS 5. Searching on the internet, I found lots of users having similar issues. The difference though, was that they were using the new iPhone 4S while I was using iPhone 3Gs. However, saying that, they both were running iOS 5. Bingo!

Some websites reported that the degraded battery life on iPhone 4S was due to a bug in the way Location Services was checking and setting the Time Zone. The bug resulted in Location Services doing this task abit too often, which resulted in the higher battery drain. Turning off the automatic setting of Time Zone in Location Services was a fix that many recommended.

I decided to give the same fix a go on my iPhone. The steps are listed below.
1. Open up Settings in your iPhone
2. Locate Location Services and then tap it to open it
3. Navigate to the end of the screen till you see System Services. Tap this to open it
4. In the screen that shows now, turn off Setting Time Zone by sliding the button beside it to OFF.
(for good measure, I turned off Location-Based iAds as well)

Doing the above restored my iPhone to the similar (if not same) battery life that I had before the upgrade.

The fix above should work for any iPhone running iOS 5.

Hope this brings relief to others that had batteries running empty sooner than expected.