Nokia S40 phones’ can’t sync with Google or any other good online web services. So if you wanted to export your contacts from your phone and import them into your GMail contacts/other contact management, how would you accomplish this?
It’s a little complicated, but easy once you do it for the first time.
From your Nokia S40 phone:
Take a backup of only your contacts, and transfer this backup file to your computer, running GNU/Linux(if anyone can replicate this process on Windows, drop a comment).
On your desktop:
The NBF file is a simple zipped file. Unzip this zip file, and navigate your way to the contacts folder:
$ unzip Backup000.NBF $ cd predefhiddenfolder/backup/WIP/32/contacts/
If the above specified path does not exist, then look for the directory contacts in the extracted directory.
The contacts are stored in the most popular vcard format, all the contacts you have are in a separate vcard for each contact. Let’s combine all of these into one single vcard file:
$ cat *.vcf > ~/Desktop/phone-contacts.vcf
Now you can import this file into any contact management application that supports the vcard format.
For GMail:
Navigate to Contacts(it’s located a the top left corner), then under More actions, click on Import. Choose the newly created combined vcard file(located on your desktop) and click on Import.
To clean up things, in the Contacts view in GMail, again select More actions, and click on Find & merge duplicates…, this will ensure that you don’t have duplicate contacts, and clean up your contacts as well.
If someone accomplishes this in Windows, please leave a comment on doing so.
Comments
11 responses to “Import your Nokia S40 Contacts to Google or the like”
Thank you very much!
I am wondering if it is somehow possible to make this way syncing the Mac’s phonebook with my Nokia Phone? Couldn’t I add just some more vcards, zip the backup again and then restore that backup, would that work?
Another question: Unzipping the backup which included my messages there was a folder “predefmessages” with all the messages, tough each in a single file which needs is not readable right away if I try to open one of those files in a text editor. I can read the text though but there are a lot of strange characters… Do you have an idea in which format they are stored or maybe somehow encrypted??
Hey Martes,
Perhaps the messages are encoded in a different text format?
Maybe you could try doing that from your Mac. I no longer use a Nokia phone.
I fix the unified file manually using Notepad++ in windows.
Within Notepad++, the first thing i do was covert encoding to UTF-8 w/o BOM.
then, i check line by line deleting weird characters.
Hey Polux,
thanks for your answer.
You write that there are still weird characters, so it sounds like it is still not the right encoding, or what do you think?
I uploaded one file here, so we are sure to talk about the same “problem”: http://www.4shared.com/file/7LNsuPbF/00000A123EB640F500002010005000.html
I tried out different encodings, but still there is no readable date or something which I guess is somewhere stored in that file…
Cheers
u r awesome
Also, note that it appears that if one has both phone memory and sim contacts, the backup application will backup only phone memory contacts – at least my Nokia C2 did. Copying sim contacts to memory resolved this issue.
Most S40 phones sync with Google contacts via SyncML.
Configuration is given by Google Help.
Though it has some issues like it does 50 contacts/sync
Nice work…i was wondering how could I backup my contacts to a reliable place and your advice looks very helpful.It would be nice if you could elaborate how to restore contacts just in case they get deleted accidently.That would be great advice.Thanks
Are you referring to restoring your contacts within your Nokia phone? If so, you can always keep the backup file from the phone on your computer, and always use that file to restore your contacts.
When I had moved on from a Nokia S40 phone to my Android based phone, I had written this.
Just adding that you can also restore your contacts from Gmail if you accidentally delete them from any Android device or Gmail itself. You have 30 days for that post that they are removed from your account as well. just go to MORE under Contacts option and select RESTORE. You will see various options there……….Ujjal
Nice work…i was wondering how could I backup my contacts to a reliable place and your advice looks very helpful.It would be nice if you could elaborate how to restore contacts just in case they get deleted accidently.That would be great advice.Thanks